A Quote by 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.
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.
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.
Sci-Hub arose as a tool to be used in a Russian-speaking online research community.
There are so many sci-fi fans and it's such a big business now. So many people love sci-fi, and they're so loyal. I would be lying if I said that the fact that I had been on a very popular sci-fi show and had some recognition in that world didn't help me get the job on another sci-fi show.
The thing that has disturbed me most about the Russian hacking episode is - and the thing that surprised me most has not been the fact of Russian hacking. The cyber world is full of information gathering, you know, propaganda, et cetera. I have been concerned about the degree to which, in some circles, you've seen people suggest that Vladimir Putin has more credibility than the U.S. government. I think that's something new.
I perceive Sci-Hub as a practical side of my research.
Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science.
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.
I've actually found that most of my jobs have been in sci-fi. I realized it because sci-fi has the biggest fan following. Every time I do a play in London all these sci-fi fans come out. They ask me to sign things from all these little projects that I did. I hadn't even made the connection. It doesn't always have a spaceship and guns; sci-fi has been projected on in someway. I did Never Let Me Go, which is sort of Star Trek-y. It's about the future and training humans. It's sci-fi too. It's such a broad umbrella.
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 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.
I'm not from a particularly sci-fi background. I'm not anti sci-fi at all, but I've never been known as a sci-fi writer and, suddenly, I was creating a flagship BBC sci-fi show, which is terrifying sometimes.
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.
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.
There's an old Russian saying that goes some way or another. I don't know it. I don't speak Russian. But sometimes I think about it and wonder if it's relevant to what I'm going through at the time. Probably not. I mean what do Russian know about hunger, anyway?
I've been going to Russia since 1979. I've been going quite frequently, and I've always had a wonderful rapport with the Russian audiences and with the Russian people.
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