Alexandra Elbakyan Quotes

Alexandra Elbakyan

Profession : Activist

Birth : November 6, 1988

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

I do know about stories where hackers that left Russia or Ukraine for Europe or the United States were unexpectedly arrested.

Alexandra Elbakyan

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?

Alexandra Elbakyan

It's useful to know how to go around domain blocking.

Alexandra Elbakyan

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

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.

Alexandra Elbakyan

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.

Alexandra Elbakyan

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

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

Science should belong to scientists and not the publishers.

Alexandra Elbakyan