Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan (, born 6 November 1988) is a Kazakhstani computer programmer and creator of the website Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers without regard for copyright. According to a study published in 2018, Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature.
Elbakyan has been described as "Science's Pirate Queen". In 2016, Nature included her in their list of the top ten "people who mattered" in science. Since 2011, she has been living in Russia.
Youth
Elbakyan was born in Almaty, Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (then called Alma-Ata in the Soviet Union), on 6 November 1988. She identifies as "multiracial having ... Armenian, Slavic and Asian roots." Alexandra was raised by a single mother, who was an accomplished computer programmer.
Alexandra started programming at the age of 12, making web pages in HTML and later writing in PHP, Delphi, and Assembly languages. She attempted to create a Tamagotchi powered by artificial intelligence. She performed her first computer hack at the age of 14; using SQL injection, she obtained access to all logins and passwords of her home internet provider. Later, she discovered there were more vulnerabilities of the cross-site scripting type. She reported these issues to the internet provider, hoping to get a job with them, but this did not happen. Instead, the provider cut off her internet access. Alexandra wrote in her blog that she first hacked a publisher's website when she was 16. The publisher was MIT Press, which published online books on neuroscience, but they were locked behind a paywall that she could not afford. Alexandra wrote a PHP program that exploited a vulnerability on the website to download paywalled books without payment.
Studies
In 2009, she obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the Kazakh National Technical University, specializing in information security. She studied the possibility of using EEG brainwaves for authentication instead of using a password. While working on her thesis, Elbakyan discovered the paywall problem with accessing journal articles, as her university did not have access to many publications related to her work.
Alexandra became interested in developing brain–computer interfaces and in 2010 she joined the University of Freiburg to work on such a project, which eventually led to her summer internship in neuroscience at Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States. The same year, Elbakyan spoke at the Humanity+ Summit at Harvard on the topic "Brain-Computer Interfacing, Consciousness, and the Global Brain". Elbakyan's idea was to develop a new kind of brain-machine interface that would merge human and machine qualia. She also participated in the Towards a Science of Consciousness conference that was held in Tucson, Arizona with the poster "Consciousness in Mixed Systems: Merging Artificial and Biological Minds via Brain-Machine Interface".
From 2012 to 2014, she was a master's student at Higher School of Economics in Moscow, but then dropped out. According to a 2016 interview, her neuroscience research was on hold, but she was enrolled in a history of science master's program at a private university in an undisclosed location. Her thesis would focus on scientific communication. In 2019, she graduated from Saint Petersburg State University with a master's degree in linguistics. She currently lives in Moscow and is studying philosophy at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Sci-Hub
According to Elbakyan, Sci-Hub is a simplified version of a Global Brain because it "connects [the] brains of many researchers."
Elbakyan developed Sci-Hub in 2011, when she lived in Kazakhstan. It was characterized by Science correspondent John Bohannon as "an awe-inspiring act of altruism or a massive criminal enterprise, depending on whom you ask." Elbakyan has stated that the script was initially intended to make access to academic papers fast and convenient, without a global goal of making all science free.
When academic publisher Elsevier sued Sci-Hub in the US in 2015, Elbakyan wrote a letter to the judge, wherein she explained her motives for starting the project: she could not afford to pay for each of the hundreds of papers she needed for her research project, so she had to pirate them. She founded her website to help others in the same situation. In the letter Elbakyan has provided various arguments in support for her cause, such as Elsevier not being an author of papers, and not paying the authors, mentioning that "The general opinion in research community is that research papers should be distributed for free (open access), not sold".