Open Access Round Up

" ... Tadeusz Iwaniec is a professor of maths at Syracuse University. He signed the cost of knowledge pledge recently, and gave a pretty scary tale as his reason for taking action. In short, according to Prof Iwaniec, someone he’d never heard of published a paper in an Elsevier journal and listed him as a co-author. When Iwaniec told the journal they’d made a mistake they were the opposite of co-operative, and it apparently took $12,000 of lawyering before Elsevier’s attorney admitted that 'Dr. T. Iwaniec was not a co-author of this article'. The journal in question, by the way, was Computers & Mathematics with Applications, which you might recognise as the same organ which published an article by M. Sivasubramanian containing 'no scientific content' ..."