Alexandra Elbakyan speaks about how Sci-Hub came to be

For those who'd prefer simply reading, I offer:

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Hello.

I'm Alexandra Elbakyan and I've been invited to speak about my project, Sci-Hub.

What is the project about?

It is a website to read academic journalis for free, journals that cost a lot of money. You can read any paid journal for free on the website. The website is very popular among students and researchers. Today millions of people around the world are using it. For exmple, in in Belgium there were 200,000 users last year. Yandex counter shows that in Belgium Sci-Hub is most popular among 25--34 year olds. Most are male they are 68%. These statistics are not very different from the rest of the world, 69%. Russian has equal number of male and female users. I'm not sure whether Yandex counter is reliable but in general stats are interesting

People often ask me: how did Sci-Hub emerge and why did I create it?

The story begins in 2004 when I was at school, I had neuroscience as a hobby, and I was interested in how the brain and intelligence work. I collected ebooks on that topic on my computer. Most books I got from pirate websites and the eMule network. I found a website called MIT CogNet with a lot of neuroscience books, but they were paywalled. Of course I did not have money to buy books, so I looked around and discovered a bug on that website. You had to tweak a URL a bit to download any paid book for free. I was very happy then. I wrote a PHP scirpt then to download any book for free.

After 4 years I was a final year university student. I studied programming but also I was interested in neuroscience. Then I read in news about a novel technology of brain-machine interfaces --- a technology to connect brain directly to computer. I was very inspired then --- we can for example connect many people to the computer so their brains will form a big network that will be one big neural network. Such network will give immediate access to consciousness of all connected people.

But what if we connect not only people but animals? For example a bird or a fish or a frog or a bat. In 1974 philosopher named Thomas Nagel published a paper titled "What is it Like to be a Bat?" In other words does bat have consciousness? It is obvious to us that airplanes and helicopters do not feel anything they are just machines but what about a bat?

You can reply that a bat has a nervous sysetem while plane or helicopter only have computer that controls them. But in this case is unclear which properties do neurons have that make consciousness to emerge? There exist very simple simple nervous systems --- worms have only a few hundred neurons but do worms have consciousness. Finally we can create artificial neural network and again the question here: does it have consciousness or is it just a computer program? I thought that brian-machine interfaces will help us answer that. Connect the bat and the human brain and to computer at the same time so we can enter its mind and feel what is it like to be a bat.

BMI will help us solve the hard problem of consciousness that philosophers have been trying to solve for many years. But today of course BMI have only simple applications only. For example type text, or control computer by the power of thought that is helpful for handicapped or locked-in patients.

In 2003 neurscientist named Theodore Berger he wanted to create hippocampal implant --- a brain chip to replace damaged hippocampus. The idea didn't work but it was interesting, so when I was finishing university in 2009 I decided to do a project with brain-machine interfaces. But all the literature on that topic was published in paywalled journals. It was the first time I encountered a paid journal. Again, I did not have money to pay them.

I thought then there must be some software to open such articles for free. There were the examples of the Napster program to download music for free, or file torrents to download movies for free. If we can download music and movies for free, the same must be possible for research papers.

Two years later, in 2011, I registered on an Internet forum on molecular biology. Here I met many people in the same problem --- they couldn't get access to research journals because of the very high prices. I was working as a web programmer, so it became clear to me: how could I create a website where any paid journal can be read for free? So that's how Sci-Hub was born.

The project became popular right away, first among Russian researchers, then among researchers worldwide. So the project allows researchers around the world to exchange information freely.

Before Sci-Hub there were projects with the same mission. For example in 1991 a physicist name Paul Ginsparg started the arXiv.org project here scientists can upload their preprints for free access. The project got very popular. many people then were thinking that preprints will make science free, but 20 years later most papers remained paywalled. Preprints didn't work!

And then Sci-Hub appeared.

How well does Sci-Hub work?

In 2018 a paper was published Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly research. that is not surprising since the size of its database is > 80 million papers, and they are all free.

But what prevents Sci-Hub from wide recognition?

The major problem is its legal status. There are lawsuits against Sci-Hub and in many countries it is blocked, for exmaple in France, Austria, Italy, Great Britain, and there is an attempt to block it in India. Many people find it ridiculous it turns out to be against the law to read scientific literature. That is because of copyright law: it disallows copying information without permission of the owner. But who is the owner of the research journals? They are huge corporations such as Elsevier or Wiley that sell research journals and make huge profits. In my view science should belong to all the people. It shouldn't be owned by a few private companies. Any law that prevents access to science knowledge is fundamentally unjust

This is not the first case where research library has been persecuted by law. A few years ago there was a research library called Gigapedia, where all books were free to read. But it was closed in 2012. Many people protested then, but it didn't help. It shoudn't be that way. My goal is for Sci-Hub to be recognised as a legal project and privatization of science should be prohibited.

To conclude today, the Internet is a primative global nervous system, but when nothing can prevent the free exchange of knowledge, it will become truly intelligent.