Science and Communism are the Same (Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan, founder of Sci-Hub)
For this interview I spoke with Alexandra Elbakyan (@ringo_ring) the founder of Sci-Hub, the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of academic research papers for absolutely free. As you can imagine, what she's doing is illegal and has had countless issues with government and privately owned journals that paywall science funded by the public. This means that she cannot create a bank account to accept donations to continue her work and only acc...
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Transcript
Hey, everyone. What you're about to listen to is an interview that I did with Alexandra Elbakyan, who is the founder of Scihub. Alexandra has to be probably one of my dream guests, and I feel very, very lucky and fortunate to have been able to get her onto the podcast. But it did come with some slight difficulties, mainly being that Alexandra doesn't speak in English, even though she can understand it. So for this interview, what you'll notice is that I will ask questions in English, and then Alexandra will respond in Russian. And since most of you guys who are listening probably don't understand Russian, neither do I, I was lucky enough to find Maria, who is a translator between Russian and English, to help me out with the translations. So after I ask a question in English, Alexandra will begin to answer that question in Russian. But then what I do for the editing is that I basically just give the first few seconds of Alexandra speaking in Russian, and then I fade it out for the actual translation that Maria gave during the interview. So I just wanted to give a heads up for that. And I also wanted to mention why I wanted so much to have Alexandra on the podcast to talk about Scihub is because I think Scihub is one of the best examples, for the left to look at when thinking about cryptocurrencies as a tool for organizing. I think when you listen to the interview, it'll become very clear as to why Alexandra chose to only provide cryptocurrencies as an option to pay, her to uphold the infrastructure for Scihub to make science freely available to everyone. And so I highly encourage people, if they have the ability to do so, if they have some cryptocurrency to spare, to go to scihub.ru/cryptodonate and throw some cryptocurrency her way. Additionally, if you're feeling extra giving, you can also go to my Patreon at patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist and pitch into my efforts starting at $3 a month if you think that the content that I make is important. So you can help me out and join the newest patrons like Marvin Lin, Rat Queen, and Miles Peyton. Any amount really helps since making this stuff isn't free in terms of money or time. As a patron, you'll get a shout out on an episode like I just did and access to Patreon exclusive content like q and a episodes where you can submit and vote on questions you'd like me to answer. And I'll give my thoughts in roughly mid twenty minutes. In the latest Patreon episode, I actually just gave a review of my experience at Lisbon Blockchain Week, which also includes some references to another project that actually I've started recently, but that I haven't announced to the public yet. Of course, I'll still be making free content like this interview to help spread the message that blockchain does not need to be used to further entrench capitalist exploitation if you put our efforts into it. And so if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider out. But also make sure you help out Alexandra with Scihub if you have some cryptocurrency to spare. But, yeah, that's it for me. Let's get to the interview with Alexandra. Alright. Hello everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast, and I have probably a guest today that I have been the most excited to have on my podcast actually. I have Alexandra Elbakyan. She is the founder of Scihub. And Scihub is basically if you don't know, it's one of the first pirating websites in the world that's been able to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of academic research papers to people for free. I've personally used this website like crazy. It's really helped me a lot for being able to read academic papers. And, it's it has a mission that I really, really agree with. And one of the very interesting things about Scihub is that, they accept cryptocurrency in order to fund its operations. And so I thought Alexandra would be a really great guest to have, to talk about her experience of, making Scihub and about, handling cryptocurrency and and things like that. So hi, Alexandra. How are you doing?
Hi. Not bad.
Great. So maybe to start off, I think it would be really interesting just to hear from you, what exactly inspired you to start Scihub?
So there wasn't a specific, single thing that inspired me to start the project. Well, first of all, I was a student myself, and I was, writing on and working on the topic of neurocomputer interfaces. And then I faced the problem that most of the scientific articles that I needed for my work were with paid access, and I thought I would need to come up with some sort of a, program to, deal with it. And, the logic was as follows. So if we can access and download free movies or free music online, then why isn't there a thing for scientific papers? And second, I then noticed that a lot of people were faced with the same problem and would need the solution for it.
Nice. So it it seems to come from a very, a very practical reason for why you needed something like that. It was, you you had a problem and you needed to fix it.
That that that it's a factoring. Yeah.
Yes. That's about it. It's not like there was some new global idea and ideology behind it.
So now that Scihab has been around for a while, of course, it's been all over the news that Scihab has had some, legal issues. But I'm wondering if you could talk about just all the different types of issues that you've faced since starting Scihab. Since, you know, Scihab is directly, eating into the profits of large journals, large scientific and academic journals like Elsevier and, like, all these other ones who basically, gate access to publicly funded scientific research. So I'm wondering what types of things have you faced in starting,
Scihab? No. Yes.
So yeah. Well, speaking about legal problems, so, the main problem is that Scihab gets sued in various countries, France, Italy, Switzerland, The UK, and in Russia. And, in most of those countries, the access is actually just banned by the provider. But, specifically in The US since 2015, they, they decided that I would need to pay them $15,000,000. Well, I haven't paid that yet.
Yeah. It's a it's a crazy amount of money. I mean, I've also heard as well, some reports about things like, I mean, like the FBI subpoenaing you and, you know, some form of, surveillance from these type of states, security apparatuses from The US. And then, of course, like, issues with, having any sort of, like, bank account or, and yeah. Of course, like you've mentioned, all these site, takedowns.
No.
Okay. Speaking of FBI. Well, first of all, when I work, I always keep in mind that all the information which is based on what which is stored in widely accessible servers can potentially be read by the FBI. That's why I just don't store confidential data and confidential information on platforms such as Google or Apple, etcetera. Speaking of the thing that you mentioned that was on the news, so, I did find in my mailbox once an email from Apple which stated that two years ago, the FBI had requested information on me and that Apple had provided that information. But, like, I do have an Apple account, but I don't use it mostly. And, of course, I don't, store anything confidential there. So this particular investigation didn't cause me any inconvenience. However, I found it quite hilarious, so I did post it on Twitter, and the tweet became really popular. Gained about a million views. And even Edward Snowden reacted, and he, called, Saathub one of the greatest scientific achievements.
Yeah. I I I mean, I I saw that, that tweet as well. It's I mean, it's kind of interesting in that, I mean, Apple sort of, markets itself as the, like, more privacy respecting tech company compared to the other ones. But in reality is what kind of what you're showing is that Apple is just sort of like any other tech company, really. If they're pushed hard enough, they will give information to, you know, the FBI or whoever asked them because they want to continue to exist, to continue making profits, etcetera, etcetera.
No. Yes. Yes.
Well, to be honest, I don't know if if it's gonna sound paranoid, but I do think that Apple computers themselves may not be very safe. And theoretically, they could, watch what you're doing on your desktop.
Yeah. But, you know, when you first started Scihab, did you ever even imagine that you would get this level of attention from governments?
No. Yes.
Well, speaking of the level of attention, I actually wouldn't say that we are very popular with the media. And so people such as Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, they'd of course, they were in a much worse situation, but still it looked to me as if they were, you know, promoted in a way. On the media, there were plenty of news about them. A lot of things were publicized. And got a couple of, articles, couple of publications at best. So, you know, I don't think we are, comparable in in in in the level of popularity. But speaking about, you know, legal persecution, of course, when I was setting up the project, I I I did understand that it's a pirate project and that people would, would, try to close it up. Yeah.
Yeah. It's I I I imagine that part of the reason is just because, at least in the case of Snowden and Assange, it was directly, they were directly stealing the secrets of, you know, the state apparatus. Whereas I think in the case of Scihab, it's, you know, in my opinion, it's giving back what should be free already. But, you know, it's, I guess it's, it's not as like, you know, sexy for the media to say, like, you know, scientific papers are are free at this website or something like that. Could be part of it. I don't know. But, yeah, I guess it to me, it seems like just a very, very strange system that we have where people have to pay for scientific research through or they already pay for scientific research with their taxes and yet privately owned, academic journals somehow get the right to paywall that research, you know, with permission of the governments that originally paid for that research, which is, you know, theoretically funded by by you and me, by taxpayers, of course. I'm just curious. What what do you think, like, upholds this, like, very crazy and seemingly backwards system?
So, well, speaking about that arguments that you, that you provided that, you know, since, since things are tax funded, then they should be available to, the public. Well, I don't think it's not it's necessarily true because, for example, there are a lot of secret studies being carried out, which are also funded by taxpayers, but, you know, very few people actually have access to them. But speaking about what maintains, this, situation is, of course, the presence of intellectual property. So science has technically become the intellectual property of a number of corporations.
So then are are you against intellectual property?
Of course. I generally think that the Internet should be completely communistic.
That leads perfectly to my next question, which is I was curious to find to to know more about your views on communism and its relationship to science. So I've in the research that I've done, I had read a little bit that you had given some talks before about how, communism and science are very, very similar. So I'm curious if you could expand on on this idea and, yeah. Because I I also feel like Scihab is a very communistic idea, of course. Mhmm.
So there was this guy called Robert Neptune, a, a researcher, and he had developed four established the four principles of science. And one of those principles was communism, which, which, implied that the results of, scientific studies could be access should be accessible to everyone, and this is all the only way that science can move forward. So, speaking about my personal motivation, I think it's USSR related because in The USSR, our science, our scientific progress was really spectacular, and science was a priority. But as soon as the Soviet Union fell apart, this also also, got really decayed.
Potentially then, maybe you were inspired for Syhub a little bit with this experience of living under communism and experiencing the, I guess, the effects of, what happened when the Soviet Union fell, maybe.
Well, I mean, Saarhav was always a communistic project for me because based on the concept that scientific knowledge should be the property of everybody and accessible to everybody and not, you know, be confined to, as a a couple of, corporations.
No. Yes. We got Oscar. Yes. We got Arita.
Because, if we're talking about how science works in general, a lot of researchers point out that only when science and scientific knowledge is common to everyone,
only then can scientific progress be gained. I think this this, like, perfectly highlights, I think, the, like, the way that capitalism, like, through property and through enclosures of different types of property, sort of inhibits human progress actually. You know, you can people, of course, have this idea, at least in the West, that, you know, capitalism has, like, you know, propelled us into, like, technological advancements that have never been seen before. And only because of the free market have we been able to reach it. And because we've given, you know, billionaires a ton of money, then, you know, that's the only thing to incentivize people to actually make new stuff. But here, I guess, if you're actually in the sciences and you're actually a part of maybe that bleeding edge, I think it's pretty easy to see that actually this sort of tendency for private enclosure and private property under capitalism sort of inhibits scientific progress. Mhmm.
Yeah. And there are plenty of scientific publications which, speak of the same that, commercialization and privatization of, scientific knowledge hampers and hinders progress.
And it's kind of interesting that Marx and Engels, they distinguished their form of socialism as scientific socialism as opposed to, you know, utopian socialism, previously. So I, I, I, I, I, I, when I was, you know, in my view, when I was reading, you know, their work, it was sort of like I sort of resonated with trying to take a sign or how Marx and Engels were trying to take a scientific approach to history in the same way that, you know, I took a scientific approach to, you know, the things that I was studying in university or, or, you know, different types of work that I was doing that was related to science. I I don't know if that if that resonates with you at all.
I I didn't really, catch, the end of it. Could you just please come again?
That's, like, I really resonated with the way that, Marx and Engels were approaching, history from a scientific framework. Similarly to how I approached, you know, whenever I was studying university, I studied neuroscience. So I had a very scientific approach, to neuroscience, of course, and was taught in, you know, the scientific method and such in order to find out, you know, experiments, how they, you know, having a how important it is to have an independent and dependent variable and, like, you know, to be able to have these type of comparisons. And so I sort of resonated with the way that Marx and Engels tried to take a scientific approach to history.
Speaking of neuroscience, actually, that's that's one argument which I often which I sometimes use. And, it's that if we think of how our brain works, it's technically a giant communication network where billions of neurons communicate with each other. And so our brain is naturally communistic. So, speaking, from that standpoint, science should also be communist.
I I love that. Sure. We could talk we could talk I I would love to make all these different neuroscience metaphors with you now and with communism. But, so at the moment, you know, because of all these legal issues that, Scihub has faced, one of the ways that Scihub continues its operations is through accepting donations in cryptocurrency. I saw before it was just Bitcoin, but now you guys have expanded to a whole lot more. So people, if they go to the Scihub sites, then they can give, in a lot of different cryptocurrencies they might hold to to support, Scihub. But, I'm curious why do you think this is the best way for a project like yours to receive some form of money to pay for your infrastructure?
Well, that's actually very simple. So if you try to link, your project with some system that accepts donations, like and it accepts donations via bank cards, then even if you just simply go into the rules of that donation, website, then you're gonna see that one of their rules is that the project has to be legal, so which which which won't work in this case. And, so I did have PayPal at some point. It was actually, while it was working, it was very efficient and fast and people, kept sending donations. But at some prop point, it would get frozen, by PayPal. So and in 2013, Elsevier, actually filed an official complaint, about, Sci Hub, with PayPal, and my account was frozen for good. I think this highlights
perfectly what exactly, I try to advocate for when it comes to projects and organizations that are similar to Scihub, where if you are actually going to counter sort of capitalist institutions in some way, then you're going to receive probably some pushback from those same institutions. And one of the easiest ways or the easiest things that they can do to stop you is to prevent you from getting a normal bank account, to stop you from getting PayPal or any even if it's one of these other fintech companies, as long as it's linked to the traditional financial system, then they can stop you, like crazy. I mean, you know, the Elsevier or some other company like that just has to make a request to PayPal, and they'll listen because there is, you know, solidarity amongst capitalists to sort of, prevent this type of thing from from happening. So I'm Yeah. I guess is does that resonate with with you as well? No.
So I'll you know, I also thought about the thing that you said about the media and how maybe Scihab and scientific paper topic may not sound too sexy to the media. Every each media has some editor in chief who is on top of of of, their work. And, in several cases, I spoke with journalists who did want to cover Scihab and did want to write about us, and the topic got blocked by the editor in chief. And, so, I I even, recently I'm not sure how true that is, but I recently spoke to one guy who works for, Russia Today, and he said he wanted to write about. And he said that this publication was blocked at the very top level.
Wow. So, like, even yeah. Even but I guess media companies know sort of who their bosses are, kind of. Like, a lot of media companies, at least nowadays, are sort of, they're funded by, I mean, they themselves are capitalist corporations, and they are very well funded by other capitalist corporations or make a lot of money from them.
But also their work, they they themselves somehow are linked with this intellectual property.
Yeah. That's that's, yeah, that's that's a good point. Like, I mean, more and more intellectual property has become sort of like a, a very, very, like, key thing for corporations to own in order to keep money flowing. I mean, in the case of, you know, I'm just thinking of, like, you know, pharmaceutical companies, keeping the intellectual property around their, their product. If they can keep it for, you know, when they keep it, they you know, generics can't be made, for example, and only until it expires, you know, after ten years or something like that. But then there are all these loopholes where, pharmaceutical companies will, you know, reapply for the intellectual property, for the patent, like, towards the end of their ten years for a slightly different disease, and then extended another ten years that they can always keep that that that position. And so intellectual property is super important for a lot of different industries. And so I think when they maybe when they see something like Scihub, you know, maybe consciously or not, something is lighting up. They're like, oh, shit. You know, that can mess with my business plan too. But so have you ever received any criticisms for accepting cryptocurrencies as donations?
No.
Well, it's not really criticisms, but many say, I don't really know how to use cryptocurrencies. It's gonna be difficult for me to learn. Can I can I maybe use some PayPal? Can I just send you via bank account?
Yeah. I guess one of the downsides of it, of course, is that, you know, there's, you need to have specific knowledge on how to send it and how to use it. But, yeah, I guess when you're in such a position, you don't really have a choice. You can't say, oh, yeah. I have a special PayPal just for you, or something like that. And I guess part part of this, I guess, is, the reason why you've recently expanded to not just Bitcoin but to other cryptocurrencies.
Yeah. But even that proved not enough, and people, keep sending me requests to add cryptocurrencies that I don't have yet, but I will add them later.
Yeah. Yeah. There's there's there are so many different ones that it's it's, difficult to even keep up. But, yeah. No. But it it is it is it has been for me very, very interesting to see to to see this, like, development happen over time where, I mean, I I remember there was just the option for Bitcoin, but now you have, options for, a lot of other ones including, like, Ethereum.
So by the way, speaking of Bitcoin, I did get, some criticism at some point, because I was using the same address over and over again, and people were claiming that it just wasn't anonymous enough and people and it could be easily seen how much money has been donated to me. So I've now set it up in such a way that the address is dynamically changing.
Yeah. That that's a that's a very, interesting point. One one of the things that's, I guess, is potentially a downside with accepting cryptocurrencies on a type of blockchain like Bitcoin and most of the other ones, if it's not a privacy oriented one, like something like Monero is more, it's more hidden, is that you can sort of see all of the transactions. And potentially, at some point in the future, you know, the the FBI or whoever else that wants to do something could, you know, track and trace where the flow of money is going and could sort of, attack your network through that information.
Not exactly sure. I didn't.
So by the way, there was one bit of criticism, saying that the donations to Saihab are not very transparent. So, like, people don't can't see how much I get and what I spend it on. And, honestly, the reason is is that, you know, keeping all those accounts open and transparent is just very, very time and resource consuming.
Yeah. And and it's something that is potentially incriminating whether either to you or to someone that you are, like, interacting with or or transacting with in order to keep up the infrastructure for Scihub. Have you thought about I'm curious about, like, using any of the smart contract applications for Ethereum or anything more advanced with that?
So not yet. Because honestly, I haven't explored it in enough detail detail yet. I know there's a course on Coursera, in, Bitcoin engineering. I've been thinking of doing this course sometime soon. I had one more idea of maybe establishing some sort of scientific cryptocurrency? Because, you know, there are cryptocurrencies that are used in specific field, but there's no such thing as scientific cryptocurrency. We could, create some sort of a scicorn.
Yeah. That would I would, definitely invest in a Scihub coin if that was available.
So, potentially, we could use this to pay for the work of publishing houses. Like, for example, today, in order to publish, in open access journals, you need to pay. The author has to pay, money, so it could be paid via scientific cryptocurrency.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That would be very cool. I know I've I've heard of a couple of different projects who are thinking somewhat similarly. It could be really interesting to to hook to to connect with them. But, yeah. I mean, some some of the things, that I was thinking I know you haven't maybe done much time, doing research on it, but, like, I I it could be really interesting to have, like using Ethereum smart contracts, to take, you know, the money that you receive and either, hold it in a type of multisignature wallets or, like, a wallet that's hold by held by multiple people, or you could sort of, you know, invest the money that you received into, some sort of, like, decentralized finance application where you can earn interest on, like, the money that you're receiving. Some sort of interesting things like that. You could even make, you know, like a coin or a voting a voting, a governance token. It's a voting token where you can let people who are part of Scihub be able to vote on particular things, but would be something very interesting at some point in the future. So do you think others who are inspired by these type of communistic ideals, should take cryptocurrency more seriously?
So, actually, I've noticed the crypto has a feature that it's more, it's it people with capitalist views tend to like it more. Yeah. Because or maybe it's because, this is a sort of a payment system that allows you to make transactions not under government control. So I think that crypto is sort of a capitalist thing, and communist tend not to be, you know, very fond of it. Maybe because, you know, it's something to do with money and yeah. So they're not very much into it. That's something that I've observed as well, of course, is that generally people who are
into cryptocurrency tend to lean to the right a bit more, let's say, on on on average. I wouldn't say that's everyone, but I would say, on average, it it it's definitely leaning to the right. And it's sort of a big reason why I felt like I had to make, the platform, to sort of give a a left wing voice, to that space and to give, like, a left wing analysis of it. But, yeah, I guess, do you have what do you what would be your argument to sort of get more people with similar ideas as you who maybe want to, challenge these type of capitalist institutions, but, who are maybe anti crypto. What what would you say to them?
Well, first, of course, I would say that cryptocurrency has this feature that it's decentralized. So this is genuinely people's money, which people themselves manage, not like we have not like it happens with banks where there's this big corporation where someone on top controls the money.
It's, yeah. I guess reminding people that the current system is broken anyways and that, it isn't an option for a lot of people, especially if you're going to challenge, their their their power. So, yeah, thanks a lot for, for coming on. It's been super interesting. What I would like I mean, one of the things that I think, would be nice for people to know is, from you, what is the best way that they can support Scihab right now at this moment?
Mhmm. Well, I think the best way to, support Sci Hub right now would be to promote it in a way that's you know, to help it to help it, get relieved of all the legal issues and, to promote it into being considered legal and, ultimately, to help it with, taking down those restrictions of intellectual property.
And, maybe to to to end it off, how can people keep up with what's going on with Scihab and, these types of issues?
Yeah.
So, you know, I used to previously post, all updates on Twitter. But as you know, the account was recently blocked, was recently banned. It was in the beginning of this year. So I'm thinking of setting up a new section on the website itself sometime in the future so so the people would be able to subscribe to updates and get them, to their mailboxes.
Nice. So a a newsletter should be coming out maybe, soon. And maybe one last thing is can can you share the what is the URL where people can go to to donate cryptocurrency? No.
Mhmm. Let me just type it in the chat. Alright. So
it's scy-hub.ru/cryptodonate. Okay. Or scyhub.s.se/cryptodonate.
So seis, .se is banned in many places. The one which is with the .true, address, it's quite new, and it's possibly, available in many, many places now. The .true one is newer.
Alright. Great. I'll be sure to include those in the in the episode description, so people should definitely check out the websites. They should, donate some amount of crypto because it is for a very good cause and it's for something that is, actually challenging capitalist institutions. And, Alexandra is doing, you know, God's work in, fighting against these type of, yeah, gatekeepers of scientific information. So thank you so much for coming on. And, I I wish, you know, Sci Hub all the best.
I'm just gonna say a couple of words to Alexandra. I just wanted to say that I, I mentioned Sci Hub in my in my acknowledgments section in in the, dissertation in my PhD dissertation. It's in the link between late life depression and dementia because I'm a psychiatrist. So I encourage everybody to do the same personally. Thank you so
much.