I do not understand the obsession with publication, especially since Millette has presented his findings at conferences. Conference presentations are a legitimate form of publicly presenting results, though admittedly (usually) not at the same level of peer review as professional journals. In addition, his preliminary report is available online, with data and some analysis. That is his data. It will not magically change if it ends up in a peer-reviewed journal. When he does publish the paper, what will change that will make his work go from completely worthless (in your eyes) to worth taking seriously?
I may have exaggerated the difficulty of publishing a paper detailing research like Millette's dust study. However, submitting a paper for publication is not just a matter of putting all the graphs and data in a file and sticking a one-sentence conclusion on the end. There is the matter of clearly explaining everything in a concise manner, including what is relevant and leaving out what is not, and getting all citations to previous research upon which his current work is based. I do not know how far along his manuscript is with respect to these goals, or whether he wants more data to say exactly what brand of paint he found. Not to mention the fact that he runs his own lab with paying costumers, which presumably is a non-trivial time commitment.
The point is, there are countless legitimate reasons that can explain why he still has not published. Your claim that unpublished (or slowly published) research implies fraud is false.
Before we lay into the truthers on the meaning and importance of publication, keep in mind that some of us on the "debunker" side bear some responsibility for why they act that way over publication and peer review. It's not total fault, since we didn't mean for things to turn out like they did, but it is partially due to what we said.
Way back in 2006, when Steven Jones was first making the rounds with his claims, many of us - myself included - were vocal about the scientist making claims without scientific merit. Our critique back then was that, if Jones was so blasted sure of himself, why doesn't he conduct a formal study and submit his findings to the relevant journal for peer review? The idea was that
if the truthers, plus Jones himself, were going to make/allow for his credentials to be used as an argument from authority, then he'd better back it up by actually
following the accepted academic route for publishing and validating knowledge.
Now of course back then, the challenge was simply a critique, not a true expectation of action. However, given that,
if the goal was to validate the findings, my guess is that we all would've expected an attempt to submit to legit publishers, then complaints about how the fix is in when the paper got rejected. What we did
NOT predict was that Jones would go the Self Licking Ice Cream Cone route and create a group (Scholars for 9/11 Truth) to give the
appearance of semi-legit, academic status to the notion of truther research, nor to then go the vanity publishing route in a journal with nearly nonexistent editorial controls (see prior threads, most especially the ones quoting Peter Suber, for background) to add more of a façade of legitimacy to his work.
Most of us who spoke had at least a bare understanding of the role publication plays in creating academic knowledge, which includes the vetting role. But we never took the criticism that far because we simply underestimated just how much will there was on the conspiracy peddling side to be duplicitous. So now, the narrative that gets circulated is that a researcher found evidence of thermite, and not that a researcher went way outside his professional competence avoided all accepted academic routes to disguise his research in a false cloak of academic respectability, and still turned out a paper with evidence that contradicts the conclusions. But now, the truthers keep on about publication and even try to turn the argument around (which, as an aside, is the biggest demonstration of cargo-cult argumentativeness I've ever seen. Aping the form of a critique does not automatically lend it the depth that the original has, but that doesn't stop the conspiracy narrative cheerleaders).
Anyway, to roll this all up: This entire topic of peer review and publication is a most illustrative example of unexpected consequences that you can find in this subforum. The original idea behind the original critique was to illuminate and inform, not to show a way a process can be circumvented. But again, it's been manifest from Day 1 that the truthers goals have never been about discovering the truth, so in hindsight I guess it shouldn't be surprising.
