Activist

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.

Science should belong to scientists and not the publishers.

There should be no obstacles to accessing knowledge.

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.

All content should be copied without restriction. But for education and research, copyright laws are especially damaging.

I am a freelance programmer so I am flexible about my working hours and have quite a lot of free time.

When I was a student in Kazakhstan University, I did not have access to any research papers. These papers I needed for my research project. Payment of 32 dollars is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them.

It's useful to know how to go around domain blocking.

I have a lot of supporters but they are not well organized. They send me donations but for the most part, their commitment is not really serious.

Sci-Hub arose as a tool to be used in a Russian-speaking online research community.

Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science.

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 do know about stories where hackers that left Russia or Ukraine for Europe or the United States were unexpectedly arrested.

I started programming before even being in school.

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.

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.

There is the possibility to be suddenly arrested for hacking.

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.

I know there are some reasons to suspect me: after all, I have education in computer security and was a hobby hacker in teenage years. But hacking is not my occupation, and I do not have any job within any intelligence, either Russian or some another.