Meet Alexandra Elbakyan, the researcher who's breaking the law to make science free for all
For years, there's been a battle in academia over access to knowledge. Proponents of the
open access movement argue that science is a public good, often funded by taxpayers, and that locking it up behind expensive paywalls stalls scientific progress.
Opponents, particularly the publishers of journals, argue that there are all sorts of costs that go into publishing science and those costs need to be recovered. Without publishers, they argue, there would be no arbiters of science.
Enter Alexandra Elbakyan. Hailed as
a hero by open access acolytes, she's on a mission to make the world's science accessible to all.
In 2011, the Kazakhstan native quietly launched a site called Sci-Hub,
which now hosts 47 million academic papers. To be clear, this isn't legal. Elbakyan doesn't own the copyrights to these articles; the publishers do. That's part of the reason the global journal publisher Elsevier took action against Elbakyan. A New York district court in October also ordered that the site be taken down; it returned this week with a new overseas domain.
In Elbakyan's view, it's not just publishers who are impediments to science access — copyrights should be abolished, too.
So far, the neuroscience researcher has managed to evade the law from her base in what is believed to be Russia. (She would not confirm her location.) In an email interview, I asked her about the legal challenges she's now facing, her guiding philosophy, and what she makes of Sci-Hub's critics.
Julia Belluz: People are calling you the "Robin Hood of science." What do you think about that?
Alexandra Elbakyan: Some people can argue that this is inaccurate, since Robin Hood was a robber and free copying of information cannot be equated to robbery. Copying is not the same as stealing, because the owner does not lose his possession.
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