30 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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

I started programming before even being in school.

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.

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 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.

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.