The Library of Alexandra

Just a heads up The following story does include a brief discussion of suicide. Please listen with care.

Wait, you're listening?

All right.

Okay, all right, you're listening to RadioLab from Radiolab WNYC.

Get some levels.

Hi, hello.

I'm Lula Miller.

I'm Latif Nasser.

Today on Radiolab Pirates.

Scientists.

And the fight to make everything we know about anything available to everyone, anywhere.

Yeah, wait, so where, where are we supposed to start? Are we supposed to start with a little Kazakhstan report?

Start like you, Yeah, comes to us from Reporter, However you feel comfortable. Yeah, be like, Owen, okay.

We can always change the beginning.

Okay, so basically how I remember it is, I think Psyhub came up in a pitch meeting at some point. I don't remember exactly how Latif maybe you do.

I'm, well, I, I just know I'm the and I don't even know if we're legally allowed to say this. But like I am the PsyHub evangelist on staff, I have been using it for a very long time. I think it's so profound and powerful, and I I tell everybody every chance I can about Psyhub.

So I'm basically the exact same way. I first learned about it during my freshman year of college from a good friend of mine named Ziv.

Okay.

He, he was an older student than me, I think he was a senior when I was a freshman, and he was a really dorky dude. Like everyone he talked to, he called them professor, like every time, like he called you professor.

Yeah, exactly, it's so simple.

And I never looked back. I mean, I used it for everything at school, but really as a journalist, too.

Yeah, it is. It is a cornerstone of how I do my job and and really just how I learn anything new.

Yeah, yeah, look, I mean, at that point, if you're not at a university. These articles are like 20 to a hundred dollars, I mean, sometimes more just for a single article. But on PsyHub it's a hundred percent free.

That's right.

That's right, and I don't know, I just, I guess. I didn't really question it, like it was clear that this was something illegal. But I was just like, It's so perfect, why would I even bother looking into it?

This is something that we need for our jobs.

But just like regular people, too, you can actually look at the research being downloaded in real time. It's like the side effect of some drug or behavioral biases in investment decision making. Comparison of the plaque assay on tissue culture the way mothers use their voice to calm their hospitalized infant.

God, I love that this thing exists, it's like such a beautiful, open door to the world.

Is it technically illegal? Yes, all of those papers are copyrighted and owned, and giving them out for free is illegal.

Okay.

And this is a battle that's been going on for decades, you know, despite for open access to scientific research and the question of who owns it. And I don't know if you know the story of Aaron Schwartz.

Yes, yeah, sure.

I'm not sure I do.

So Aaron Schwartz, he was this computer programmer, total whiz kid. He had helped develop the computer architecture for RSS, Feeds and Creative Commons. By the time he was like, 15, yeah. And he was heavily involved in the fight for open access to scientific research.

Yeah.

But not long after downloading JSTOR, they went to his apartment, went through all of his personal effects. After he surrendered voluntarily, they arrested him, they strip searched him, and they left him in solitary confinement for hours. He was caught, arrested, slapped with a whole suite of fraud and piracy charges, which would have meant like 35 years in jail, million dollar fine.

They weren't natural at all.

They were things that could be changed, and they were things that, more importantly, were wrong and should change. This is him back in 2010, once I realized that there were real serious problems, fundamental problems that I could do something to address. I didn't see a way to forget that, I didn't see a way not to.

I just, I was in grad school there when this happened. And it was just this young man who just had the noblest intentions. Seemed to just be. Just be like a like. A promising human being like this was a guy who, like, gave it, you know, and wanted to give everyone access.

Yeah, and what he was fighting against is almost like a caricature of capitalist greed.

Yeah, well, there are basically five publishers who dominate scholarly article publishing.

That's Jeff Mackey Mason, he's the head librarian at UC Berkeley, Yes.

Campus libraries report to me.

And he told me that while there are some nonprofit groups that publish scientific research, the big four.

Elsevier, Springer, Nature, Wiley and Taylor and Francis are for-profit publishers.

And they're like these huge conglomerates of a bunch of kind of scientific journals.

They have broad portfolios. Elsevier has over 2,500 different journals it publishes, they're the biggest.

And the way this business works is actually kind of crazy. Like the publishers, they don't actually fund the research. Almost all of the funding either comes from government grants or private grants. No expense there. Now, all academic research needs to be peer-reviewed.

Meaning, validated by scholars who are experts in the subject matter that the article is about.

But those peers do it gratis.

Generally, it's considered part of our professional service, yeah.

So they don't pay the peer reviewers either.

Do they pay the writers? Usually of the journals? No.

It's the researchers who are doing the writing, they are paying for the work of maintaining a journal, which is primarily editing. The editors of these journals determine what is truly important research. You know, distinguishing it from the crowd of everything else that's out there, okay?

I would say to people, look, the fact that money is going to the publishers is not intrinsically a bad thing because otherwise they wouldn't publish. But the problem is that many of them are getting far more money than they need. Because they're getting very high profits. On a profit basis, the publishers are getting higher operating returns than Apple or Google gets.

I mean, that kind of boggles my mind a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, this is. The core problem is that they're charging us to read the research that we did, that the public paid for, and they're charging us more than the system can afford. Wow.

Like, you make a thing, they just put a stamp on it and then sell it back to you for an extraordinary amount of money. You know, like it's like to use an annoying Silicon Valley, like it's like, this system needs to be disrupted, like someone needs to disrupt this.

Clearly, lots of people have tried. I mean, obviously that's exactly what Aaron Schwartz was trying to do. Yeah, but the law and society came down on the side of publishers.

Just one person.

This whole site, as far as we know, the sole operator is this Kazakhstani woman, Alexandra Elbakian.

What? and wait, her name again? So she wait, Alexandra, what's her last name?

Elbakian.

And I don't know why I care, but it's not a pen name.

So I'm very confident that that is her real name. Because while she's been very hard to get a hold of for an actual interview, we have found her 90-page Russian biography.

What 33-year-olds write autobiographies?

Exactly.

Wait, do you speak Russian?

No, but we got it translated. Okay, it's got this black background and green hacker text.

Is she just, I mean, knowing what we know of her? is she just a disagreeable person?

Well, this is the autobiography. So, from her point of view, it's almost always that other people are too aggressive, too stupid to work with her, right? But what we know for sure? 2011 Erin Schwartz has been indicted and she starts Sci-Hub.

Sci-Hub is breaking the law by distributing material that they don't have the legal right to distribute.

But Alexandra, she just sort of refuses to even show up in court.

It's like a forfeit.

It's kind of like a forfeit. So the judge awards the publishers $15 million in damages, Oh my gosh, $15 million U.S dollars.

That she clearly does not have.

And there's never even really been a pretense that she would pay. It's just kind of this unspoken agreement that as long as she stays in wherever she is, she will never pay a dime.

Is she being actively protected? Is Interpol trying to find her?

So the FBI definitely thinks she's being protected by the Russians. I know that they think that because they have subpoenaed all of her Google data and all of her Apple data. And it seems like the reason is, or at least it's been reported, that the reason is that. She's in collusion with Russian intelligence operations. And it is still in no way clear where in the world exactly she is.

It's all so mysterious, yeah.

But she is online, very online, and so I started dming her and she doesn't really do a lot of interviews. I couldn't find any where she's speaking in English, but yeah, she wrote back.

Wow.

So we started talking, and it's strange. She would text me for an hour straight and then disappear for weeks. Sometimes I'd ask her questions and she would just flat out tell me I feel kind of uncomfortable answering such stupid questions. Wow, nothing personal.

She's calling you stupid.

Yeah, I don't know nothing personal. She gave me enough to keep wanting more. But she eventually kind of went quiet for weeks and then months. And I sort of thought, maybe for good.

Oh, wow.

Whoa?

I mean, this really almost felt like she was trying to call my bluff like, just, you know, okay, fine, you really care about this, ha ha ha ha, you know?

Wow, so what are you going to do?

Yeah, I mean, at this point, I just felt like I had to understand who the hell she actually was, I mean, in my mind, she is. This combination of Robin Hood, Carmen Sandiego, Edward Snowden, all wrapped into one.

And we will find out what happens when Eli lands.

That's after the break.

Stick around.

This week, on the New Yorker Radio Hour, we'll talk about Kamala Harris and the complexity of being biracial in America. There's a real return to the idea that your appearance is what matters. And if your appearance is unclear to us, then we're going to discount you and we're going to accuse you of being an imposter. The writer Danzey Sena joins us on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego Lulu Latif?

Radiolab.

That was my favorite show.

It was so good, loved her hat.

Anyway, back to this story.

Yep.

We are here with intrepid reporter Eli Cohen, who has just tracked down the Carmen Sandiego Edward Snowden, Robin Hood-esque figure, at the center of the website Sci-Hub.

Alexandra Elbakian She usually lives in hiding, but she has just dared Eli to come see her face to face in Kazakhstan.

A few days later, I was traveling from San Francisco to Kazakhstan.

Until.

Until I see this woman with bright dyed hair and these kind of lilac purple pants, and then this printed button down with all of these words on it. Like, Humanity, chaos, change. And I just know that has to be her hello.

A girl.

To be a girl? Yes, oh, really, it's very surprising. Oh, I'm so sorry.

Oh, the whole time.

It was so clear, right, that she had done no real like looking into me, or like, she was just like, Yeah, whatever.

I just, I had, like, I don't know how to say in English, an impression.

Anyhow, we started walking towards her aunt's apartment, where we were going to sit down and talk.

We are almost here.

And it was this very basic, gray, five-story concrete box apartment building.

Hello.

And, uh, which tea do you like?

Oh.

Black one or green one, black, black, black? After some tea with her mom and her aunt, we sat down in their living room, surrounded by family photos, to do the interview. How are you feeling?

It's good.

Okay, great, well, to start out then. There have been accusations from the United States Justice Department, the FBI, that you are a Russian spy. Are you a Russian spy?

No.

Even if you were a Russian spy, what would you tell me?

No.

Why do you think they?

I think if I were a Russian spy, I wouldn't be meeting you in the first place. I would have other priorities.

That's a fair point. And I gotta say, talking to her, she struck me as way more of a grown-up computer kid than any sort of thief or spy.

Well, actually, at first, when they have started, I just was doing it because it was fun and I felt happy.

Can you say more about that?

Perhaps I'm not very good at describing feelings, but perhaps.

Going back all the way to when she was a kid, she says she'd always found it sort of hard to find her place, hard to connect with people.

I remember myself when I was seven years old, I really remember, I didn't feel good, I felt unlike other kids.

Didn't have a lot of friends.

Yeah, and I found the school boring, maybe I was depressed or something like that.

But this feeling followed her through her academic career. You know, I mentioned that she studied in the U..S, in Germany, a couple other places. And she said she felt like she just wasn't getting the recognition that she deserved and just kind of ended up feeling left out.

So I think maybe this is just what kind of a person I was.

And so she decides to leave and actually ends back up in Kazakhstan. And so she's sitting at home in front of a computer. On this science forum, this kind of internet forum.

For molecular biology.

And there were dozens of posts there with people saying I'm doing this and this research, I need this and that paper. I'm not affiliated with a Western university, I need access.

So it's like paper exchange section.

And seeing all these requests, she thinks to herself I might still have some of these logins, I can definitely get my hands on some. And, you know, help these people get the papers that they need. And she just kind of starts doing it just as sort of a casual activity.

Something like a game, but also.

Pretty quickly.

Like, for me, it became some kind of a social activity, it was a way to connect to people. Because, you know, sending academic paper caused a lot of emotion in another person. They were extremely happy and very excited receiving that paper.

She actually wrote about this moment in her autobiography. She says For the first time, thank you was said to me.

Wow.

Like, somebody actually was grateful for the work that I had done.

Yeah, so you just monitor.

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

It depends on the university. Some cost, for example, like $7 or $12..

Anyway, she wrote some code that would take a link for the paper. Make it look like a student at the university was requesting it, and then send it off to the user who'd asked for it and did it work?

To my surprise, yes, it did work.

Boom, sci-hub is born.

And immediately became, how to say, popular.

The website Sci-hub Sci-hub.

Sci-Hub.

It is sci-hub.

What did you just say? Sci-Hub? So first days it was like maybe a couple of thousand requests per day from Russia, but after that Sci-hub..io, the website, spread to other forums.

And requests started coming in from all over the world.

Italy, Sweden, Chinese.

India.

Iranian.

By 2019, Sci-Hub is netting almost half a million downloads every day from practically every country in the world.

No.

No.

No, why?

I mean, but you knew what had happened to, for instance, like Aaron Schwartz? Yes, of course.

But I remember I didn't pay a lot of attention.

You just didn't think that that could happen to you.

No.

Now, of course, that didn't happen. But she says, even still, when she was sued in 2015, she didn't consider taking the site down. No, why not? Wouldn't that make the threat go away?

Perhaps, but sci-hub? At that point, it was necessary.

Like, Sci-Hub had just become this indispensable tool for thousands, if not millions of people, in some places, it was people's only option.

For example, Iran under sanctions, so they couldn't legally buy the subscriptions.

Because they're under sanctions, there is no other way to get journals. And so as she saw it, she sort of had two options she could go the legal route, take the case to trial, and if she lost, suffer the consequences.

Including potentially shutting the site down.

Yes, or she could double down, skip out on the trial altogether and become a wanted woman.

She chose being a wanted woman.

Yeah.

Wait, you're allowed to say that because how old are you again?

25.

Yeah, so you're a kid, too.

Okay, okay, so he stands up. He basically says. I will be representing Ms. Elbakian in the case against Sci-Hub, and nobody knows who he is.

So my official name is Nilesh Ashok Kumarjan, but I go by Neil.

So I got a hold of Nilesh Jain, who is a lawyer, though not a copyright lawyer per se.

I'm a rogue lawyer.

But, he says, as soon as he saw Sci-Hub being sued, he immediately knew he had to step up to defend it. Yeah.

So I grew up in a very small. It's not even a town, it's a village near Udaipur, Rajasthan.

That's up in the northwest of the country, sort of on the border with Pakistan.

And I wanted to get out of that, all of it, I just wanted to go to Delhi and I think that's it.

So he got to Delhi, got a job and he wanted to study law.

But I had no money to buy all these research books on law, this is very expensive, so I did all the research for Master's course from Sci-Hub.

Nilesh basically says that Sci-Hub was the key to him getting through law school.

Wow.

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

I saw this tweet that there's a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Sci-Hub in India.

I just posted the bad news on Twitter, saying that Sci-Hub can be blocked in India in a few days.

And I was pissed because Sci-Hub was a very important site to me.

So when Nilesh saw that the tweet was from Alexandra herself, he reached out immediately.

I contacted her via Messenger, the Twitter messenger, then I asked her, Do you have any lawyer in Delhi?

Had lawyers ever reached out before?

No.

Gotcha, gotcha.

It was like, first time.

But Nilesh offers to represent her by himself, for free.

And by end of the day, we were talking about the case, the implication and everything.

And he told her India might be a great place for a case like this. Because there are so many people who don't have a lot of money but are trying to get educated that when it comes to copyright.

Indian laws are bit liberal.

So there is actually a very famous precedent for this kind of case in Indian law.

If it was a very small country, perhaps I just didn't pay attention to it.

But you knew that you had a lot of users in India? yes, about how many?

It was about 800,000 in a month, something like that.

Wow.

If we'll get a relief in our favor, this will be huge, huge relief all over the world, not just India.

So Alexandra was like, Maybe I should show up this time.

I don't know. I want to be accepted as a legal solution in all countries of the world.

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

Yeah, we have to start winning.

So just two days after he first talked to Alexandra, Nilesh shows up at this hearing. Nobody knows who he is, which is crazy. Because when it comes to these big cases, everybody knows everybody. I mean, there is a professional group of people who are the big lawyers, they're the ones who take the big cases. This is definitely going to be a big case.

I'm representing Sir Alexandra Albaikar.

Really stunned everybody. Yes, sir, sir. Is this a pass sheet? So the first hearing was on December 24th, 2020. And as soon as we heard about the case, we hired this reporter in India, Karishma Mehrotra, to check in with Nilesh as the case proceeded.

But that means she could still win eventually, right?

Sure, but for the time being, it's actually pretty bad for Alexandra. Because when she agreed to join the case, she also had to agree to an injunction.

Well, it depends. Perhaps Sci-Hub is going to remain as a kind of a museum.

Wait.

I mean that they should contain.

I think what surprised me was that she had just geared up for the biggest fight of Sci-Hub's life, and she talked about wanting to win. Going legit. But then, at the same time, she did seem to be oddly comfortable with the fact that Sci-Hub might not be all that relevant anymore. And that she might not need to keep it up anymore.

The website should contain a history of Sci-Hub and the fight for access to academic papers, and so on.

You say preserve the history of the open access movement. It almost seems to imply that the movement is coming to a close.

Well, perhaps.

I'm starting to learn a little bit more what you mean when you say, perhaps.

But I still use it, millions of people still use it all over the world all the time. If Sci-Hub disappears, that will be an immense loss.

Well, that's true, but in the time since she created it, I mean, since 2011, things have really started to change.

Today, more than 50 of new academic papers are already published in open access.

So in the past few years, all of the big publishers, they have come out in support of open access, without the whole illegal part of what Sci-Hub does. Now, of course, they still want to get paid. But instead of charging the reader to download a paper, their new approach is to charge researchers. Or, in some cases, they actually make the institutions, like universities, pay for the cost of publishing.

Very simply, what we want, and we've succeeded with these agreements, is we pay the publisher to publish articles written by University of California authors.

This is once again UC Berkeley's Jeff Mackey Mason.

Pay them enough to be in business and get a rate of return. But then once we've paid them to publish, the deal is that they make it available for free online.

So I could, in theory, go read a UC authored article at this point. Okay, I see.

And if Harvard pays to publish Harvard articles, if the University of Munich pays to publish University of Munich articles, everybody does that and there's no charge to read anything.

At the same time, the U.

So it's almost like Sci-Hub might be losing the battle, but open access is winning the war.

Maybe yeah, but I guess what has really stuck with me is Alexandra. I guess I just keep thinking, like, if Sci-Hub did suddenly disappear, what would she do? What is your endgame here? What do you do next?

Next, Well, I also have many other ideas I thought about apart from Sci-Hub.

Could you tell me some of those?

Well, for example, I was thinking about, like, creating my own research institute where we are going to study immortality problem. Oh wow, yeah.

I mean, beyond just being a really good computer programmer, she's also a very serious scientist.

Studying somewhere in parallel to Sci-Hub?

Especially in neuroscience. I actually remember in her autobiography, she has a whole section about this concept of hers, called the global brain, meaning, she explains it. Kind of like an internet. But instead of just the seamless sharing of information, there is a seamless sharing of experience. So everyone can connect their brains to this globally connected brain and can seamlessly experience what anybody else is experiencing at the same time in real time.

Like how you plug in.

Regardless of how you plug in, she is clearly this brilliant young woman with grand ambitions. I don't know. That makes it all the more painful when it seems like this fight for Sci-Hub, which has opened so many doors for so many people. It's done nothing but close them for her. Does it upset you? Everything you've had to give up to make this website?

Maybe it limited my life in some respect.

But I mean, not being able to tell people freely where you live, I mean, or not being able to freely travel to a number of countries. Does that upset you in any way?

Those are kind of things that are hard to explain.

Would you mind trying for me?

As I said, those are kind of things that are hard to explain.

Well, I'm just trying to understand what exactly those limitations are, for example, what would happen if you came to America today?

That would be not the best option.

Are there any countries that you other countries, maybe, that you've wanted to go to, but you have to?

But I really think it looks very stupid. So I think, why do we need to discuss this in detail? What could happen, what is going to happen, I don't know.

Thank you, Eli.

Yeah, no problem.

This episode was reported by Eli Cohen with Karishma Mehrotra.

It was produced by Simon Adler with help from Eli Cohen, with sound and music from Simon Adler.

It was mixed by Jeremy Bloom.

And it was edited by international Woman of Mystery Alex Neeson.

Who personally owes me millions of dollars?

I'm Leila Miller.

I'm Latif Nasser.

Thanks for listening.

Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, Paquette, Foster-Keyes, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nanasambandan, Matt Cutie, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Khari, Anna Rasquette-Paz, Sarah Sandback, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster.