It's true that we don't have a research paper per se for the multiparty protocol, but we do have a specification document [1] as well as implementations in Objective-C, Java and JavaScript. The specification, as well as the implementations, have received both professional audits (from cryptographers) as well as community audits. The reason we don't have a research paper published is simply because we're working on one right now — a redesign of the multiparty protocol based on OTR. We have cryptographers on board from various Canadian universities and are organizing an internal forum to get them to collaborate on this. We expect publishable results by June 2014.

Regarding OTR, we actually switched to that 16 months ago — it's not exactly like we recently wisened up.

[1] https://github.com/cryptocat/cryptocat/wiki/Multiparty-Proto...