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. Alexandra Elbakyan Read Quote
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. Alexandra Elbakyan Read Quote
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. Alexandra Elbakyan Read Quote
I am a freelance programmer so I am flexible about my working hours and have quite a lot of free time. Alexandra Elbakyan Read Quote
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. Alexandra Elbakyan Read Quote
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. Alexandra Elbakyan Read Quote
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. Alexandra Elbakyan Read Quote
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. Alexandra Elbakyan Read Quote
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. Alexandra Elbakyan Read Quote
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. Alexandra Elbakyan Read Quote
