Alexandra Elbakyan Quotes

Alexandra Elbakyan

Profession : Activist

Birth : November 6, 1988

Scientific knowledge belongs to humanity.

Alexandra Elbakyan

There should be no obstacles to accessing knowledge.

Alexandra Elbakyan

There is the possibility to be suddenly arrested for hacking.

Alexandra Elbakyan

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.

Alexandra Elbakyan

Journal paywalls are an example of something that works in the reverse direction, making communication less open and efficient.

Alexandra Elbakyan

I started programming before even being in school.

Alexandra Elbakyan

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.

Alexandra Elbakyan

I've always considered myself to be Russian: my native language is Russian.

Alexandra Elbakyan

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.

Alexandra Elbakyan

Sci-Hub arose as a tool to be used in a Russian-speaking online research community.

Alexandra Elbakyan

Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science.

Alexandra Elbakyan

I perceive Sci-Hub as a practical side of my research.

Alexandra Elbakyan

All content should be copied without restriction. But for education and research, copyright laws are especially damaging.

Alexandra Elbakyan

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

Alexandra Elbakyan

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

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

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

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

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.

Alexandra Elbakyan

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