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0:37

You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab.

0:40

From WNYC. The

0:42

C. The C. The C. The C. Hello.

0:48

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. One

0:51

two. One two. One two. One two. One two. We're

0:54

gonna get some. Get some levels.

0:58

Get some levels. Hey! Get

1:00

some levels. Get some levels.

1:03

Hey! Hello!

1:07

I'm

1:07

Lula Miller. I'm Lot DeFnasser. Today

1:10

on Radiolab, Pirates. Science.

1:14

And the fight to make everything we know

1:16

about anything available to everyone.

1:19

Anywhere. Yeah, wait, so where are

1:21

we supposed to start? Are we supposed to start with

1:23

a little Kazakhstan report?

1:26

Start like you, yeah. comes

1:28

to us from reporter. However you feel comfortable.

1:30

Yeah. You like Owen. Okay. We

1:33

can always change the beginning. Okay. So basically

1:36

how I remember it is, I think Sci-Hub

1:38

came up in a pitch meeting at some

1:40

point. I don't remember exactly how. Let's if

1:42

maybe you do. Well,

1:45

I just know, and I don't even know if we're legally

1:47

allowed to say this, but like I am the Sci-Hub

1:49

evangelist on staff.

1:52

I have been using it for a very long time.

1:54

I think it's so

1:56

profound and powerful and I tell everybody.

2:00

every chance I can about Sayab. So I'm

2:02

basically the exact same way. I

2:05

first learned about it during my freshman year

2:07

of college from a good friend of mine

2:10

named Ziv. He was an older

2:13

student than me. I think he was a senior when I was a freshman,

2:15

and he was a really dorky dude like

2:17

everyone he talked to. He called them professor.

2:20

Like every time- He called you professor. Yeah, I'd be like, hello,

2:23

professor. Anyway,

2:26

it was the first week of school. I was learning how to use

2:28

the library, And it was kind of a

2:30

mess. Like, if you just want to find

2:33

some journal article so you can

2:35

do your homework, there are all these

2:37

sites that you have to go to with different

2:39

logins. And I was trying to figure all

2:42

this out. When Ziv pulled me aside, he was

2:44

like, wait, it's so much easier than everything

2:46

they're telling you.

2:47

He just sat me down in front of this kind of blank

2:50

website, super bare bones. It's

2:52

just like a search field and

2:54

SciHub written on top of it. And

2:57

also, there is this image

3:00

of a black raven with a key

3:02

in its beak. Anyway, you

3:04

just throw in the paper you want into the search

3:07

field, click open,

3:09

and it downloads.

3:12

End of story. Yeah, exactly.

3:14

It's so simple. And I never

3:16

looked back. I mean, I used

3:18

it for everything at school, but really

3:21

as a journalist, Yeah, it

3:23

is a cornerstone of

3:25

how I do my job and

3:28

really just how I learn anything new. Yeah,

3:31

look, I mean, at that point, if you're

3:33

not at a university, these articles

3:35

are like $20 to $100, I mean, sometimes more, just

3:37

for a single article.

3:41

But on SciHub, it's 100% free. That's

3:44

right. That's right. And

3:46

I don't know, I guess I didn't really question it. it was

3:48

clear that this was something illegal,

3:51

but I was just like, it's so perfect.

3:53

Why why would I even bother looking into it? But

3:56

then, I started talking to people.

4:00

about SciHub. Are either of y'all familiar

4:02

with a website called SciHub? Yes.

4:05

And I realized, yeah, yeah. It

4:07

is not just a college kid work around.

4:10

It's this global network of all

4:12

kinds of people fighting for access

4:14

to scientific knowledge. I use

4:17

SciHub extensively. Hundreds

4:19

of thousands of papers are downloaded every

4:21

day. It is absolutely vital

4:23

that we protect this resource. In places

4:26

like India. in mainland

4:28

China. China.

4:30

It's

4:32

used by scientists, students, journalists,

4:34

lawyers. This is something that we need

4:37

for our jobs. But just like

4:39

regular people too, you can actually look at

4:41

the research being downloaded in real time.

4:43

It's like the side effect of some drug or

4:45

behavioral biases in investment

4:47

decision making. The comparison of the plaque assay

4:50

on tissue culture. It's the way mothers use

4:52

their voice to calm their hospitalized infant.

4:55

Hmm. These are all people who wouldn't

4:57

have had any way to access this stuff

5:00

if it weren't for Sci-Hub. Oh,

5:04

God, I love, I love

5:06

that this thing exists. It's

5:08

such a beautiful open, open

5:11

door to the

5:12

world. Is

5:16

it technically illegal? Yes, all

5:18

of those papers are copyrighted and

5:20

owned and giving them out for free is

5:22

illegal. Okay. This is a battle

5:24

that's been going on for decades, you

5:27

know, despite for open access to scientific

5:29

research and the question of who owns it. And

5:32

I

5:32

don't know if you know the story of Aaron Schwartz.

5:34

Yes, yeah, for sure. I'm not sure I do.

5:37

So Aaron Schwartz, he was this computer

5:40

programmer,

5:41

total whiz kid. He had

5:43

helped develop the computer architecture for

5:45

RSS feeds and Creative Commons. By

5:48

the time he was like 15. And

5:50

he was heavily involved in the fight for

5:52

open access to scientific research.

5:55

Anyhow, 2010, he

5:57

was a research fellow at Harvard, and he had figured

5:59

out a way to-

6:00

download all of the scientific papers

6:02

from JSTORP, which is just one repository

6:04

for research. And his motivations

6:06

were like full on utopian.

6:09

He had actually written this manifesto, and

6:12

in it he said, those with

6:14

access to these resources, students, librarians,

6:16

scientists, you have been given a privilege.

6:19

You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge

6:21

while the rest of the world is locked out, but

6:24

you need not, indeed morally, you cannot

6:27

keep this privilege for yourselves, you

6:29

have a duty to share it with the world.

6:32

Only those blinded by greed would

6:34

refuse to let a friend make a copy. Wow,

6:37

yeah. But

6:40

not long after downloading JSTOR... They

6:42

went to his apartment, went through all of his personal

6:45

effects. After he surrendered voluntarily,

6:47

they arrested him, they strip searched him, and

6:50

they left him in solitary confinement for

6:52

hours. He was caught, arrested,

6:55

slapped with a whole suite of fraud

6:58

and piracy charges, which would've

7:00

meant like 35 years in jail,

7:03

million dollar fine,

7:05

except

7:06

before the trial was finished.

7:08

The body of 26-year-old Aaron

7:10

Swartz was found in his Brooklyn apartment yesterday.

7:13

The medical examiner says he hanged

7:15

himself.

7:15

Swartz was facing a... He killed himself

7:17

in his Brooklyn apartment. Oh, man.

7:21

I slowly had this process of realizing that

7:23

all the things around me that people had told me were just

7:25

the natural way things were, the way things always

7:27

would be. They weren't natural at all. They

7:29

were things that could be changed, and they were things that more

7:31

importantly were wrong and should change. This is him back

7:34

in 2010. Once I realized that there were real

7:37

serious problems, fundamental problems that

7:39

I could do something to address, I didn't

7:41

see a way to forget that. I didn't see a way

7:43

not to.

7:45

I

7:47

just, I was in grad school

7:49

there when this happened. happened. And

7:52

it was just this young man who just

7:54

had the noblest

7:57

intentions, seemed to just

7:59

be just be like a promising

8:01

human being. Like this was a guy who like

8:03

gave a s***, you know? And wanted to

8:05

give everyone access. Yeah,

8:08

and what he was fighting against is

8:10

almost like a caricature

8:12

of capitalist greed. Yeah, well,

8:16

there are basically five publishers

8:18

who dominate scholarly article publishing.

8:21

That's Jeff Mackey Mason. He's the head librarian

8:23

at UC Berkeley. Yes, Campus Libraries

8:26

report to me. And he told me that while

8:28

there are some nonprofit groups that

8:30

publish scientific research. The big

8:32

four... Elsevier, Springer

8:35

Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis are

8:37

for-profit publishers. And they're like these huge

8:39

conglomerates of a bunch of kind of scientific

8:42

journals. They have broad portfolios. Elsevier

8:44

has over 2,500 different journals that publishes.

8:47

They're the biggest. And the way this business

8:49

works is actually kind of crazy. Like

8:52

the publishers, they don't actually fund

8:54

the research. all of the

8:56

funding either comes from government

8:58

grants or private grants. Yeah.

9:01

No expense there.

9:02

Now, all academic research

9:04

needs to be peer reviewed. Meaning validated

9:07

by scholars who are experts in the subject

9:09

matter that the article is about. But those

9:12

peers do it gratis.

9:14

Generally, it's considered part

9:16

of our professional service. Yeah. So

9:18

they don't pay the peer reviewers either.

9:21

They... Do they pay the writers usually of

9:23

the journalism? No, it's the researchers

9:26

who are doing the writing. They are paying

9:28

for the work of maintaining

9:30

a journal, which is primarily editing.

9:34

The editors of these journals determine what

9:37

is truly important research, distinguishing

9:39

it from the crowd of everything else that's out

9:41

there. And we actually received comment

9:43

from most, though not all, of these big five

9:45

publishers. And their argument was

9:47

essentially that

9:48

that work

9:49

offers a kind of quality control,

9:52

a standard setting, that is

9:54

essential to the integrity of the research that

9:57

they're going to publish.

9:58

you know they would say that that's a costly

10:01

and worthwhile contribution. I would

10:03

say to people, look, the fact that money

10:05

is going to the publishers

10:07

is not intrinsically a bad thing, because otherwise they

10:10

wouldn't publish. But the

10:12

problem is that many of them are getting far

10:15

more money than they need because they're getting very high profits.

10:18

On a profit basis, the publishers are getting

10:20

higher operating returns than Apple

10:22

or Google gets.

10:24

I mean, that kind of boggles

10:26

my mind a little bit. Yeah, I mean,

10:29

this is the core problem, is that they're charging us

10:32

to read the research that we did, that

10:34

the public paid for, and they're charging

10:36

us more than the system can afford. Wow.

10:39

Like, you make a thing, they

10:41

just put a stamp on it and then sell it back to you

10:44

for an extraordinary amount

10:46

of money. You know, like, it's like to use

10:48

an annoying silicon. Like, it's like, this system

10:50

needs to be disrupted. Like, someone needs to disrupt

10:52

this. Well, clearly, lots of people have tried. I

10:54

mean, obviously that's exactly

10:57

what Aaron Schwartz was trying to do. Yeah.

10:59

But the law

11:01

and society

11:02

came down on the side of publishers. But

11:08

then 2011,

11:08

the year that Aaron Schwartz

11:11

is indicted, SciHub

11:12

comes on the scene and just for

11:14

context, Aaron downloaded

11:16

about 4.8 million articles from

11:19

JSTOR before he was caught.

11:22

Sci-Hub just blew that

11:24

out of the water. 88 million

11:27

articles, basically from every

11:29

publisher. At its peak, it housed

11:32

over 90 percent of every

11:34

article ever published. Wow.

11:39

The entire thing, it

11:41

is the work of one single person.

11:43

What? Just one person? This whole site,

11:46

as far as we know, the

11:48

sole operator is this

11:51

Kazakhstan woman, Alexandra

11:53

Albakian. What?

11:54

And wait, her name again? So she, wait, Alexandra,

11:56

what's her last name? Al-Baqiyyun.

11:59

and I don't know why I care, but

12:01

it's not a pen name. It's not like- So

12:04

I'm very confident that that is her real

12:07

name because

12:09

while she's been very hard

12:11

to get a hold of for an actual interview, we

12:14

have found her 90 page Russian

12:17

biography.

12:18

Auto

12:22

biography. Auto biography.

12:24

How old is she? She is 33.

12:30

What 33-year-olds write autobiographies?

12:32

Exactly. Wait, do you speak Russian? No,

12:35

but we got it translated. Okay. Oh, wow.

12:38

It's got this like black background and like

12:40

green hacker text. Oh. And

12:45

it is just called autobiography 1.1.

12:46

So

12:50

Alexandra was born on November 6th, 1988. She

12:53

was born in Almaty, Kazakhstan, which

12:56

is a former Soviet state. By

12:59

age 12, she'd built her first website.

13:02

By age 14, she'd hacked her first

13:04

website. She goes to university, ends

13:06

up getting her degree in computer science.

13:09

Then she spends a couple of years bouncing

13:11

around a couple different labs, some in Germany,

13:14

in the US, mainly in neuroscience.

13:16

And it's a little hard to follow here, but

13:19

she talks about how contributions that she made

13:21

just didn't get acknowledged. Like, she

13:23

always kind of seems to be getting in fights with

13:26

her research assistants, with her superiors.

13:30

Is she just, I mean, knowing what we

13:32

know of her, like, is she just a disagreeable

13:34

person? Well, this

13:37

is the autobiography. So from

13:39

her point of view, it's almost always that other

13:42

people are too aggressive, too stupid

13:44

to work with her. Right. But

13:47

what we know for sure, 2011, Erin

13:50

Schwartz has been indicted and she

13:52

starts sai ha.

13:54

And in only four years, it's getting pretty

13:56

big and the publishers take her to court, making

13:58

a pretty simple art.

14:00

Sci hub is breaking the law by

14:02

distributing material that they don't have the legal right to distribute.

14:04

But Alexandra, she just sort

14:07

of refuses to even show up in court. It's

14:09

like a forfeit. It's kind of like a forfeit.

14:11

So the judge awards the publishers $15 million

14:14

in damages. Oh,

14:16

my gosh. $15 million

14:19

US dollars. Wow. That

14:21

she clearly does not ask.

14:24

And there's never even really been a pretense

14:26

that she would pay. It's just

14:30

kind of this unspoken agreement that as long

14:32

as she stays in wherever

14:34

she is, she will never pay a dime.

14:36

Is she being actively protected? Like, is

14:38

Interpol, like, trying to find her? So

14:41

the FBI definitely

14:44

thinks she's being protected by

14:47

the Russians. I know that they

14:49

think that because they

14:51

have subpoenaed all of her Google

14:53

data and all of her Apple data, And

14:56

it seems like the reason is, or

14:58

at least it's been reported that the reason

15:00

is that she's in collusion

15:02

with Russian

15:04

intelligence operations. And

15:07

it is still in no way clear where

15:10

in the world exactly she is.

15:11

It's also mysterious, yeah.

15:14

But she is online, very online. And

15:16

so I started DMing her. And

15:21

she doesn't really do a lot of interviews. a

15:23

lot of interviews. I couldn't find any where

15:25

she's speaking in English, but

15:28

yeah,

15:29

she wrote back. Wow.

15:32

So we started talking and it's strange.

15:36

She would text me for an hour

15:38

straight and then disappear for

15:41

weeks. Sometimes

15:43

I'd ask her questions and she would just flat out

15:45

tell me I feel kind of uncomfortable

15:48

answering such stupid questions. Wow.

15:50

Nothing personal. She's telling you stupid. I

15:53

don't know. She

15:55

gave me enough to keep wanting more,

15:58

but

15:58

she eventually kind of... I went quiet

16:01

for weeks and then months,

16:04

and I sort of thought maybe for good, until

16:07

one day, really out of nowhere,

16:10

I got a message from her. If you want to record,

16:12

I will be back in Kazakhstan

16:14

and we can meet here next weekend.

16:17

Oh, wow. Whoa. I mean, this really

16:19

almost felt like she was trying to call my bluff, like

16:21

just, you know, okay, fine, you really care about

16:24

this? Ha ha ha ha, you know? Wow.

16:26

So what are you gonna do?

16:28

Yeah.

16:29

I mean, at this point, I just felt like

16:31

I had to understand who the hell

16:34

she actually was. I mean, in my mind, she

16:36

has this combination of Robin

16:39

Hood, Carmen Sandiego, Edward

16:41

Snowden, all wrapped into one.

16:45

So I went

16:47

to Kazakhstan.

16:53

And we will find out what happens when

16:56

Eli lands. That's after the break.

16:59

Stick around. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] The

17:13

New York Philharmonic has made a lot of

17:15

music since its first concert in 1842 and

17:18

collected a lot of stories. Now

17:21

you can enjoy the best of both in a new

17:23

podcast. I'm Jamie Bernstein.

17:26

Join me and discover a story of New

17:28

York told through the music and musicians

17:30

who helped make the Phil the cultural landmark

17:33

it is today. It's the NY

17:35

Phil Story made in New York. Listen

17:38

wherever you get podcasts.

17:44

Where in the world

17:47

is Scaramont? Lulu? Luteth?

17:50

Radiolab? That was my favorite show. It

17:52

was

17:52

so good. Loved her hat. Anyway,

17:54

back to this story. Yep, we are here with

17:57

intrepid reporter Eli Cohen, who has just

17:59

tracked down- the Carmen Sandiego

18:02

Edward Snowden Robin Hood-esque figure

18:05

at the center of the website, SciHub.

18:08

Alexandra

18:08

Elbakian, she usually

18:10

lives in hiding, but she has just dared

18:13

Eli to come see her face

18:15

to face

18:16

in Kazakhstan. A

18:20

few days later, I was traveling from

18:22

San Francisco to Kazakhstan. So

18:26

left on a Wednesday afternoon, got in

18:28

Friday morning, sleep

18:30

straight through a third day because I'm so

18:33

jet lagged. Wake up Saturday morning

18:35

and

18:39

we've got the interview. Hello,

18:42

one, two, three, one, two, three. Alrighty,

18:45

here I am in front of the Best Western

18:47

Plus. I am 12 minutes away

18:50

from meeting Alexandra Elbakian.

18:53

Oh, man. So we agreed to meet at

18:56

this roundabout in front of my hotel.

18:59

kind of surrounded by gray, nondescript

19:01

buildings and this huge Soviet

19:04

archway. There were cars

19:06

buzzing around, people milling about. I

19:08

told her I'm out by the big

19:09

archway, by the road intersection.

19:12

Now, I'm still a little bit terrified

19:15

that she is not going to show up. I wonder, has

19:17

she seen my message?

19:20

And so I'm standing out there, just waiting.

19:22

I can stand it. And

19:25

waiting. And

19:29

waiting. Until

19:35

I see this woman with bright dyed hair

19:38

and these kind of lilac purple pants

19:41

and then this printed button down

19:44

with all of these words on it like humanity,

19:47

chaos, change. And

19:49

I just know that has to be her. Hello!

19:53

So nice to finally meet

19:55

you. I expected you to be a girl.

19:58

To be what? Thank you.

20:00

To be a girl. Yes. Oh

20:02

really? Oh, I'm

20:04

so sorry. Oh the whole time

20:12

We it was so clear right that

20:14

that she had done no Real

20:18

like right looking into me or like

20:20

had like she was like, yeah, whatever

20:23

Like I don't know

20:25

how to see English an impression Anyhow,

20:29

we started walking towards her aunt's apartment,

20:31

where we were going to sit down and talk. And

20:35

it was this very basic, gray,

20:38

five-story, concrete box apartment

20:40

building. This is the big one? Hello.

20:46

And... Which tea do you

20:48

like? Oh. Black ones or

20:50

green ones? Black? Black.

20:53

After some tea with her mom and her aunt,

20:56

We

20:56

sat down in their living room, surrounded

20:58

by family photos, to do

21:00

the interview. How are you feeling? Are you...

21:03

you feel ready? Good to go? It's good. Okay.

21:07

Great. Well, to start out,

21:09

then, there have been accusations from

21:11

the

21:12

United States Justice Department, the

21:14

FBI, that you are a Russian

21:17

spy. Are you a Russian

21:19

spy? No. Even

21:22

if you were a Russian spy, what would

21:24

you tell me? No. Why

21:26

do you think this? I

21:30

think if I were a Russian spy, I

21:32

wouldn't be meeting you in the first place.

21:35

I would have other priorities. That's a

21:37

fair point. And I got to say, talking to her, she

21:39

struck me as way more of a grown-up

21:41

computer kid than any

21:44

sort of thief or spy. Well,

21:46

actually, at first,

21:48

when they have started, I just was

21:50

doing it because it was fun

21:52

and I felt happy. Can

21:56

you say more about that? It

21:58

has been not very good at this. I've been feeling,

22:00

but perhaps... Going back all

22:03

the way to when she was a kid, she says, she'd

22:05

always found it sort of hard to find her place,

22:08

hard to connect with people.

22:09

I remember myself when

22:11

I was seven years old. I

22:13

really remember I didn't feel good. I felt

22:16

unlike other

22:16

kids. Didn't have a lot of friends. Yeah.

22:20

And I found this school boring. Maybe

22:22

I was depressed or something like

22:24

that. But this feeling followed her

22:27

through her academic career. I mentioned

22:29

that she studied in the US, in Germany, a

22:31

couple other places, and she said she

22:33

felt like she just wasn't getting the recognition

22:36

that she deserved and just kind of ended

22:38

up feeling left out.

22:40

So I think maybe this is just

22:43

what kind of a person I was. And

22:45

so she decides to leave and actually ends back

22:48

up in Kazakhstan.

22:50

And so she's sitting at home in

22:52

front of a computer on this science

22:55

forum, this kind of internet forum. for molecular

22:57

biology and...

23:00

And there were dozens of posts there with people saying,

23:02

I'm doing this and this research, I need

23:04

this and that paper, I'm not affiliated

23:07

with a Western university, I need access.

23:09

So it's not like paper exchange section.

23:11

And seeing all these requests, she thinks to herself,

23:14

I might still have some of these logins, I

23:16

can definitely get my hands on some. And

23:19

you know, help these people get the papers

23:21

that they need. And she just kind of starts doing

23:23

it just as sort of a casual

23:26

activity. something like a game, but

23:28

also... Pretty quickly. Like, for

23:30

me, it became some kind of a social

23:32

activity. It

23:34

was a way to connect to people, because,

23:37

you know, the academic paper caused

23:39

a lot of emotion in another person. They

23:43

were extremely happy and very

23:45

excited receiving that paper. Then

23:47

they replied, thank you very much. And

23:50

I felt good about that.

23:52

She actually wrote about this moment in

23:54

her autobiography. She says, for

23:56

the first time, thank you

23:59

was said to me.

24:00

Wow. Like

24:02

somebody actually was grateful

24:05

for the work that I had done.

24:07

Yes. So you just monitor. You

24:13

request a peer. And

24:16

then you quickly solve it.

24:21

But the faster she got at this, it seemed. I'm

24:23

looking for causes. Oh, I'm going to introduce

24:26

an island in Angers. Virgin, I need five. The

24:30

more requests there were pouring

24:32

in until eventually she

24:35

kind of gets to thinking,

24:37

hey, why do I

24:39

need to sit here and do this manually? I

24:42

could probably write some code

24:44

that automates all of this. So

24:47

just to get technical for a minute here. She

24:52

really just paired two ideas.

24:55

One was something called a

24:57

proxy server, which just

24:59

makes it look like her computer is at the university

25:02

or something. And then number

25:04

two is she set up this rotating

25:06

list of logins that had access

25:09

to all the library databases she needed.

25:11

These logins are the

25:14

subject of much controversy. Where does she get

25:16

them? How does she maintain them? How do they not get

25:18

shut down? She told me she just

25:20

buys them on this website. Are they

25:22

expensive?

25:23

It depends

25:25

on the university. Some costs,

25:28

for example, like $7 or $12 US dollars.

25:32

Anyway, she wrote some code that

25:34

would take a link for the paper, make

25:36

it look like a student at the university was

25:38

requesting it, and then send it off to the

25:40

user who'd asked for it. And did

25:43

it work? Too

25:46

much surprise. Yes, it did

25:48

work. Boom, SciHub

25:51

is born. and immediately

25:53

became, how to say, popular.

25:58

The website style. So

26:02

first

26:05

day it was like maybe a couple of

26:06

thousand requests per day from

26:09

Russia. But after that,

26:11

the website spread to other forums. And

26:13

requests started coming in from all over

26:15

the world. Italy, Sweden,

26:18

Chinese, India, Iranian.

26:24

By 2019, SciHub is netting

26:26

almost half a million downloads every

26:29

day from practically every country

26:31

in the world.

26:34

Is there a

26:34

voice in the back of your mind that

26:37

thinks like, this is a

26:39

little bit risky, like this

26:41

could be dangerous? No. No?

26:45

No? Why? I mean, but

26:47

you knew what had happened to, for

26:50

instance, like Aaron Schwartz. Yes, of course.

26:53

But I remember I didn't pay

26:55

a lot of attention. You just didn't

26:57

think that that could happen to you? No.

27:03

So, yeah, maybe I was

27:05

a little bit naive, but I thought that

27:08

the hub is going to overthrow

27:11

the academic publishing

27:13

and the copyright system. Yes,

27:16

I think. Now,

27:20

of course that didn't happen, but she

27:22

says even still, when she was

27:24

sued in 2015, she didn't

27:26

consider taking the site down. No.

27:29

Why not? Wouldn't that make the threat

27:32

go away?

27:34

Perhaps, but the site hub at

27:36

that point, it was necessary.

27:39

Like site hub had just become this indispensable

27:41

tool for thousands, if not

27:44

millions of people.

27:45

In some places, it was people's only

27:48

option. For example, Iran, if you're

27:50

under sanctions, so they couldn't legally

27:52

buy the subscriptions. Because they're under sanctions,

27:55

there is no other way to get journals.

27:58

And so as she saw it, she sort of had a had

28:00

two options. She could go the legal

28:02

route, take the case to trial, and

28:04

if she lost, suffered the consequences.

28:07

Including potentially shutting the site down.

28:09

Yes.

28:11

Or she

28:12

could double down,

28:13

skip out on the trial altogether, and

28:16

become a wanted woman.

28:18

So I sent a letter to the judge, where

28:21

I explained reasons why I started

28:23

Sci-Hab website, that copyright

28:26

is a law that works against

28:28

the signs that all people should have

28:30

the right to acknowledge, and

28:32

that, hence, I would not participate

28:35

in this case.

28:37

She chose being a wanted woman? Yeah.

28:41

But

28:41

then, five years later,

28:44

Alexandra made a very different decision.

28:46

So

28:51

in December of 2020, a group

28:53

of three publishers, Elsevier, Wiley,

28:56

and the American Chemical Society, They file

28:58

suit against Saihub in India.

29:01

Now at this point, Alexandra, she

29:03

sort of becomes famous for not defending

29:06

herself. So when the first hearing

29:08

opens up on Christmas Eve

29:10

in the Delhi High Court in New Delhi,

29:13

no one expects her to show up.

29:15

But then, at almost the last

29:18

possible moment,

29:19

this literal kid, 27 years old,

29:23

just a few years out of law school, enters

29:25

the courtroom. You're allowed to say that because how old are

29:27

you again? Yeah, so

29:29

you're a kid too. Okay, okay. He

29:32

stands up. He basically says, I will be

29:34

representing Miss Al-Baqyan in

29:36

the case against Saihab. And

29:39

nobody knows who he is. So

29:43

my official name is Nilesh Ashokumajian,

29:46

but I go by Neel. So I

29:48

got a hold of Neelesh Jain, who

29:50

is a lawyer, though not a copyright

29:53

lawyer per se. I'm a rogue liar."

29:56

he says as soon as he saw Psyhub

29:59

being sued

30:00

He immediately knew he had

30:02

to step up to defend it. Yeah.

30:07

So I grew up in a very

30:10

small, it's not even town, it's a village

30:12

near Udaipur Rajasthan. That's up in

30:15

the northwest of the country, sort of on the border

30:17

with Pakistan. And I wanted to get out

30:19

of that, all of it. I just wanted

30:21

to go to Delhi and I think that's it. So

30:23

he got to Delhi, got a job, and he

30:26

wanted to study law. But I had no

30:28

money to buy all this research books

30:31

on law. This is very expensive.

30:33

So I did all the research for master's course

30:36

from SciHub. Nilesh basically says

30:38

that SciHub was the key to him getting

30:40

through law school. Wow. And

30:42

on December 22, 2020, he sees a tweet. I

30:46

saw this tweet that there's a copyright infringement

30:48

lawsuit filed

30:49

against SciHub in India. I

30:51

just posted the bad news on

30:53

Twitter, saying that Sci-Hab can be blocked

30:55

in India in a few days. And

30:57

I was pissed because Sci-Hab

31:00

was a very important site to me. So when

31:02

Nilesh saw that the tweet was from Alexandra

31:04

herself, he reached out immediately. Contacted

31:07

her via Messenger, the Twitter

31:09

Messenger.

31:10

Then I asked her, do you have

31:12

any lawyer in Delhi? Had lawyers

31:14

ever reached out before? No.

31:17

Gotcha, gotcha. It was like first time. But

31:19

Nilesh offers to represent

31:22

her by himself for free.

31:25

And

31:25

by end of the day, we were talking

31:27

about the case, the implication and everything. And

31:29

he told her India might be a

31:31

great place for a case like this because

31:33

there are so many people who don't have

31:36

a lot of money but are trying to get educated

31:38

that when it comes to copyright. Indian

31:40

laws are bit liberal.

31:43

So there is actually a very famous

31:45

precedent for this kind of case in

31:47

Indian law.

31:48

Delhi University photo copy case.

31:52

So Oxford University Press

31:55

basically sues this copy shop

31:57

for letting people make copies academic

31:59

yours

32:00

And the case went to the same

32:02

Delhi High Court, which ruled what

32:04

the copy shop is doing is 100% legal due

32:07

to an educational exception. And

32:10

Sunilesh basically said to her that you might

32:13

just have a chance here. So I... Perhaps

32:15

if it was a very small country,

32:18

perhaps I would just didn't

32:21

pay attention to it.

32:22

But you knew that you had a lot of users in

32:24

India? Yes. About how many? It

32:27

was about eight. 800,000 in

32:30

a month, something like

32:33

that. Wow. If we'll

32:35

get a relief in our favor, this

32:37

will be huge. Huge

32:40

relief all over the world, not just India.

32:43

So, Alexandra was like, maybe

32:45

I should show up this time. I don't

32:47

know. I want to be accepted

32:49

as a legal solution in all countries of the

32:51

world. And the only way you're going to do that is if you win

32:53

somewhere. Yeah. We

32:56

have to start winning. So just two

32:58

days after he first talked to Alexandra, Niles

33:01

shows up at this hearing, nobody knows who

33:03

he is, which is crazy,

33:05

because

33:06

when it comes to these big cases, everybody

33:09

knows everybody. I mean, there

33:11

is a professional group of people

33:14

who are the big lawyers. They're the ones who

33:16

take the big cases. This is definitely

33:18

gonna be a big case. And for

33:20

this random guy who nobody has ever

33:23

heard of to show up...

33:24

I'm representing Elizan Ralbakhyan.

33:29

Really stunned everybody.

33:31

Yes sir, sir. You're

33:33

a bad guy. So the first hearing

33:36

was on December 24th, 2020. And

33:38

as soon as we heard about the case, we hired

33:40

this reporter in India, Karishma

33:43

Marocha, Nilesh. to check

33:45

in with Nilesh as the case proceeded. How's

33:47

your morning? Because,

33:50

well, to be honest, I really thought that

33:52

this would be the big showdown. She

33:54

had finally showed up, you know, the case

33:56

was finally going to result in a decision,

33:59

some decision.

34:00

I mean, we would land somewhere.

34:02

But they kept switching judges

34:04

one to another. I

34:08

think we might be on the fourth judge at this point.

34:11

Then it'll get done, but if after two, then

34:13

it won't get done. It got

34:15

deferred adjourned again, again, again, till...

34:18

Oh my God. Now

34:21

it just seems to be sort of stuck in

34:24

this bureaucratic hole. This

34:26

is what happens in the Indian judicial

34:28

system. Cases in India

34:30

go on for years and years before

34:33

the final judgement and all. But that means you

34:35

can still win eventually, right? Sure. But

34:38

for the time being, it's actually

34:41

pretty bad for Alexandra. Because

34:44

when she agreed to join the case,

34:47

she also had to agree to an injunction.

34:49

This

34:49

is an understanding that Sahib

34:52

won't upload new articles until we decide the

34:54

case. while the case is going on, SciHub

34:57

can't add any new scientific

35:00

papers to their database. And

35:02

it's been over two years now.

35:04

Do you worry

35:06

that waiting so long

35:08

could maybe have a bad effect on SciHub

35:11

because people would no longer think that it

35:13

has the latest research? Well, it depends.

35:16

Perhaps SciHub is going to

35:18

remain as a kind of a museum. And

35:22

yes.

35:23

Wait, sorry, as museum. What

35:26

do you mean by that? I mean

35:28

that they should contain. I think what

35:30

surprised me was that she

35:32

had just geared up for the biggest

35:35

fight of Psyhub's life. And

35:38

she talked about wanting to win, going legit.

35:40

But then at

35:42

the same time, she

35:44

did seem to be oddly

35:47

comfortable with the fact

35:49

that Psyhub might not be

35:52

all that relevant anymore. And that

35:54

she might not need to keep it up anymore.

35:57

The website

35:57

should contain a history

35:59

of and

36:02

the fight for access to academic papers and

36:04

so on. You

36:06

say preserve the history of

36:09

the open access movement. It

36:12

almost seems to imply that the movement is

36:14

coming to a close.

36:15

Well, perhaps.

36:20

I'm starting to learn a little bit more what you mean

36:22

when you say perhaps. But

36:24

I still use it. Millions of people still

36:27

use it all over the world all the time. If

36:29

Sci-Hub disappears, that will be an immense

36:32

loss. Well, that's true. But

36:35

in the time since she created

36:37

it, I mean, since 2011, things

36:39

have really started to change. Today,

36:43

more than 50% of new academic papers

36:45

are already published

36:47

in Open Access. So in the past

36:49

few years, all of the big publishers, they

36:52

have come out in support of Open Access.

36:54

Huh. without the whole

36:56

illegal part of what SciHub

36:59

does.

36:59

Now, of course, they still want to get paid, but

37:02

instead of charging the reader to download

37:04

a paper, their new approach is

37:07

to charge researchers, or

37:09

in some cases, they actually make the institutions,

37:12

like universities, pay

37:14

for the cost of publishing.

37:16

Very simply, what we want, and we've succeeded

37:18

with these agreements, is we pay the publisher to publish

37:21

articles written by University of California authors.

37:23

This is once again UC Berkeley's Jeff

37:25

Mackey-Mason. Pay them enough to be

37:27

in business and get a rate of return. But then

37:30

once we've paid them to publish, the deal is

37:32

that they make it available for free online.

37:35

So I could, I could in theory go read

37:37

a UC authored article. Yes. At

37:39

this point. Okay. I see. And if Harvard

37:42

pays to publish Harvard articles, if

37:45

the University of Munich

37:46

pays to publish University of Munich articles, if

37:48

everybody does that, and there's no charge to

37:50

read anything.

37:51

At the same time, the US government

37:53

has also decided to put its weight

37:56

behind open access. All right, welcome

37:58

everybody.

38:00

Thank you for joining us for this virtual

38:02

community forum. August 25th, 2022,

38:04

the Biden administration announced their

38:07

new policy on federally funded

38:09

research.

38:09

Open government and open science and research

38:12

are an essential part of the Biden-Harris administration's

38:15

broader commitment to providing public access

38:17

to data,

38:18

publications. So what it means is that

38:20

by 2026, every

38:23

paper that gets federal funding is

38:25

going to be made free for

38:27

anyone, anywhere, immediately.

38:30

I think SciHub, the

38:33

pressure it put on the publishers in

38:36

just setting an example, like

38:38

giving people a glimpse of this world

38:41

where

38:43

academic research could be

38:45

free. I think it kind of, yeah, it opened

38:47

the door a little bit. It cracked

38:49

the door. So it's almost

38:51

like SciHub might be

38:54

losing the battle, but

38:56

Open Access is winning the war. Maybe.

38:58

Yeah, but I guess what has

39:00

really stuck with me is Alexandra.

39:04

I guess I just keep thinking like, if Saihab did

39:07

suddenly disappear, what would she

39:09

do? What is your end game

39:12

here? What do you do next? Next?

39:16

Well, I also have many other

39:19

ideas I thought about

39:22

apart from Saihab.

39:24

Could you tell me some of those? Well, for

39:26

example, I was thinking about

39:29

creating my own research institute

39:32

where we are going to study immortality

39:35

problem. Oh, wow. Yeah.

39:38

I mean, beyond just being a

39:41

really good computer programmer, she's

39:43

also a very serious scientist. Studying

39:46

somewhere in parallel to say, have... Especially

39:49

in neuroscience.

39:51

I actually

39:53

remember in her autobiography,

39:55

she has a whole section about this

39:58

concept of hers called the globe.

40:00

brain. Meaning

40:02

she explains it kind of like an

40:05

Internet, but instead of just the seamless

40:08

sharing of information, there's a

40:10

seamless sharing of experience. So everyone

40:13

can connect

40:14

their brains to

40:17

this globally connected brain and

40:19

can seamlessly experience

40:22

what anybody else is experiencing

40:24

at the same time in real time. Yeah,

40:26

yeah, yeah, yeah. And

40:29

she admits openly that this

40:31

is a very ambitious idea and

40:33

the technical details are

40:36

somewhat- Like how you plug in. Yes. Regardless

40:40

of how you plug in,

40:43

she is clearly this brilliant

40:45

young woman with grand ambitions.

40:48

I don't know, that makes it all the more painful

40:50

when it seems like this fight for Sci-Hub,

40:53

which has opened so many doors for so many

40:55

people,

40:57

It's done nothing but close

40:59

them for her. Yeah. Does

41:02

it upset you everything you've had to give up

41:05

to make this website? Maybe

41:09

it limited my life in

41:11

some respect. But I mean, not being

41:13

able to tell people freely where

41:15

you live, I mean, or not being able to freely

41:18

travel to a number of countries. Does

41:20

that upset you in any way?

41:23

Those

41:25

are kind of things that are hard to explain.

41:29

Would you mind trying for me? As

41:32

I said, those are kind of things that are

41:34

hard to explain. Well, I'm

41:36

just trying to understand what exactly

41:38

those limitations are.

41:40

For example, what would

41:43

happen if you came

41:45

to America today? That would be

41:48

not the best option. Are

41:50

there any countries that you,

41:53

other countries maybe that you've wanted to go to, but

41:55

you have to... I really think

41:57

it looks very stupid. Why

42:00

do we need to discuss this in detail? What

42:03

could happen? What is

42:06

going to happen? I

42:08

don't know.

42:38

Thank you, Eli. Yeah, no problem.

42:48

This episode was reported by Eli Cohen

42:50

with Karishma Marotra. It was produced

42:52

by Simon Adler with help from Eli Cohen

42:55

with sound and music from Simon Adler. It

42:57

was mixed by Jeremy Bloom. And it was edited

43:00

by international woman of mystery,

43:02

Alex Neeson. who personally

43:04

owes me millions of dollars. Special

43:07

thanks to Vrindra Bandari, Balaj

43:10

Bodo, Steven Buranyi, Ian Graber-Steele,

43:13

Joel Joseph, Noreen Khalifa,

43:16

Steve McLaughlin, Abrigita Lutt,

43:18

Marcia McNutt, Randy Scheckman, and

43:21

Tan Mei-Singh.

43:25

This is Radiolab, which will continue to

43:27

be free for everyone around

43:30

the world. I'm Lula Miller. I'm Luttev

43:32

Nasser. Thanks for listening.