Alexandra Elbakyan Quotes

The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.

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.

The majority of the wealth of human knowledge is owned by a few publishing companies that hoard information and make billions off licensing fees, although most scholarly articles and journals are paid for by taxpayers through government grants.

Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science.

So many people are exploiting the name Picasso - and, in a way, even the estate is doing it.

Once a discovery has been published, there is no way of un-publishing it.

The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces.

Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.

Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.

Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries.

Just as Wall Street needs to break the hold of the bonus culture, which drives risk-taking that is rational for individuals but damaging to the financial system, so science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals. The result will be better research that better serves science and society.

Napster is essentially using the music to make money for themselves and that's the part that's both morally and legally wrong. That I think is more relevant than whether or not I'm losing money.

I'm not a huge fan of prequels and sequels and the cynical rush to make money on the back of books by other writers who are now dead.

We're on the path of creating monopoly business practices out of copyright law.

Thousands of capitalist have been enriched by inventions and discoveries of which they were not the authors, and capital, by robbing the inventor of his just reward, is guilty of stifling genius.

I perceive Sci-Hub as a practical side of my research.

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.

While open-access journals have grown rapidly, researchers still have to read the paywalled articles in commercial journals.

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

While I support granting drug companies patents to recover their investment and encourage innovation, companies that take advantage of this goodwill to build a monopoly must be stopped.

I started a crowdfunding campaign on Sci-Hub to buy additional drives, and soon had my own copy of the database collected by LibGen, around 21 million papers.

The same applies to the music and film industries. Until the heads of the labels start wanting to make money rather than creating controversy, tension, and excuses about why piracy is making the job so hard that no one could do it but them - and oh by the way, they need a raise to really focus in on the fight - the music industry is going to have a very tough time of it.

The enclosure of the biological and intellectual commons in this way is a real threat to the future of people everywhere because it creates a situation where common practices that have been part of people's lives for generations become monopolies of a handful of pharmaceutical, agribusiness and agrichemical corporations. People then become incapable of looking after their own needs.

I don't think that the real enemy of the music industry is illegal downloading; I think the real enemy of the music industry is radio.