Top 22 Alexandra Elbakyan Quotes

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.

There is the possibility to be suddenly arrested for hacking.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

There should be no obstacles to accessing knowledge.

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.

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.

I started programming before even being in school.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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