Scientific knowledge belongs to humanity.
Alexandra Elbakyan
There should be no obstacles to accessing knowledge.
Seriously, I feel more like a revolutionary because the final goal is not only to download all the articles and books and give open access to them, but to change legislation is such a way that free distribution of research papers will not face any legal obstacles.
I like their slogan 'making uncommon knowledge common' very much, but as far as I can tell Elsevier has not mastered this job well. Sci-Hub is helping them to fulfill their mission.
Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science.
I perceive Sci-Hub as a practical side of my research.
I've always considered myself to be Russian: my native language is Russian.
For me, Sci-Hub has a value by itself, as a website where users can access knowledge. There are many websites where you can see pictures, share tweets, download music, read ebooks. And Sci-Hub is a website where you can read research articles.
There is the possibility to be suddenly arrested for hacking.
It's useful to know how to go around domain blocking.
What was especially surprising for me is that there are many people who view Sci-Hub as some kind of a tool to change the system. Like changing the system was a goal, and Sci-Hub was a tool to achieve it.
I know there are some reasons to suspect me: after all, I have education in computer security and was a hobby hacker in teenage years. But hacking is not my occupation, and I do not have any job within any intelligence, either Russian or some another.
Providing free access to research papers on websites like Sci-Hub breaks so-called copyright law that was made to taboo free distribution of information on the Internet. That includes music, movies, documentaries, books, and research articles. Not everyone agrees that copyright law should exist in the first place.
Science should belong to scientists and not the publishers.
I started programming before even being in school.
I started a crowdfunding campaign on Sci-Hub to buy additional drives, and soon had my own copy of the database collected by LibGen, around 21 million papers.
I do know about stories where hackers that left Russia or Ukraine for Europe or the United States were unexpectedly arrested.
I had the idea to use electrical potential collected from the surface of the heat that our brain generates, it's like authentication using the power of thoughts. Imagine if you could use a thought instead of a password.
I think that whether I can be a Russian spy is being investigated by U.S. government since they learned about Sci-Hub, because that is very logical: a Russian project, that uses university accounts to access some information, of course that is suspicious. But in fact Sci-Hub has always been my personal enterprise.
Sci-Hub arose as a tool to be used in a Russian-speaking online research community.
Journal paywalls are an example of something that works in the reverse direction, making communication less open and efficient.
All content should be copied without restriction. But for education and research, copyright laws are especially damaging.
It may be well possible that phished passwords ended up being used at Sci-Hub. I did not send any phishing emails to anyone myself. The exact source of the passwords was never personally important to me.
Elsevier operates by racket: if you do not send money, you will not read any papers. On my website, any person can read as many papers as they want for free, and sending donations is their free will. Why Elsevier cannot work like this, I wonder?
When I was a student in Kazakhstan University, I did not have access to any research papers. These papers I needed for my research project. Payment of 32 dollars is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them.
I have a lot of supporters but they are not well organized. They send me donations but for the most part, their commitment is not really serious.
I want to collect the entire range of scientific and educational literature and make it accessible to the whole world. Just like Google Books, but maybe in a more ambitious way.
When I was working on my research project, I found out that all research papers I needed for work were paywalled. I was a student in Kazakhstan at the time and our university was not subscribed to anything.
I am a freelance programmer so I am flexible about my working hours and have quite a lot of free time.
I could obtain any paper by pirating it, so I solved many requests and people always were very grateful for my help. After that, I created sci-hub.org website that simply makes this process automatic and the website immediately became popular.
