Alexandra Elbakyan The Pirate Queen of Science

Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan (born November 6, 1988) is a Kazakhstan computer programmer and creator of the Sci-Hub website, which provides free access to research papers without regard to copyright. According to a study published in 2018, Sci-Hub provides access to almost all academic literature. Elbakyan has been described as the "Pirate Queen of Science". In 2016, nature included her in its list of the ten "people who mattered" in science. Since 2011, she lives in Russia.

Studies
He graduated in Computer Science from the Kazakh National Technical University in Almaty, Kazakhstan, specializing in computer security. During the last year of her degree, she worked on a security system that would allow people to be recognized by identifying their brain wave patterns. After graduating, she worked in the Human Media Interaction Group at the University of Twente on the mind-controlled game "Bacteria Hunt". She later joined the Human Higher Nervous Activity Laboratory, dedicated to the neural study of consciousness. Currently, he works at "The Brain Machine Interfacing Initiative" at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg.

The Sci-Hub project
On September 5, 2011, he created Sci-Hub, a website that gives any user immediate and free access to a huge percentage of the scientific articles published by the main digital scholarly publishers and distributors as soon as they are posted online. Most of these articles are only accessible on the corresponding pages by paying fees that are usually around €20-30 per article.


On June 3, 2015, Elsevier filed a lawsuit in a New York court against Alexandra Elbakyan for copyright infringement and violation of the "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act". Elbakyan was the only natural person named in the lawsuit, which is also directed against the websites Sci-Hub, Library Genesis and their operators. In November 2015, New York District Judge Robert W. Sweet issued a provisional closure order against Sci-Hub, rendering the domain inaccessible. The site became accessible again later that month after changing Sci-Hub's domain to ".tw".
The actual traffic of the site is not known. While Elsevier claims that the number of visits is around 30,000 per day, Elbakyan herself puts the number of visits in the "hundreds of thousands" each day.


In December 2016, Nature magazine named Elbakyan, one of the ten most outstanding people of the year for the impact Sci-Hub has had on the world of science.


Six months later (June 2017) Elbakyan lost the lawsuit against Elsevier and was ordered to pay a fine of 15 million dollars in compensation for copyright infringement. However, being outside the jurisdiction of the United States (the nation the trial was made), Elbakyan has not been persecuted in Russia (her place of residence) to pay this fine and it is even doubted if she ever will.


Although in an article published in The Verge, the concept of Sci-Hub is attributed to a direct influence of the sociologist Robert Merton, Elbakyan later clarified that although he was aware of Merton's work, the direct influence was the concept familiar in the states. Belonging to the USSR that "science and communism are inseparable".



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