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SPEAKER_05: I'm Lula Miller. I'm Latif Nasser. Today on Radiolab, pirates. Science. And the fight to make everything we know about anything available to everyone, anywhere.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah. You like Owen. Okay.
SPEAKER_03: We can always change the beginning. Okay. So basically how I remember it is I think Sci-Hub came up in a pitch meeting at some point. I don't remember exactly how. Latif, maybe you do. I'm, well, I just know I'm the, and I don't even know if we're legally allowed to say
SPEAKER_04: this, but like I am the Sci-Hub evangelist on staff. I have been using it for a very long time. I think it's so profound and powerful and I tell everybody every chance I can about Sci-Hub.
SPEAKER_03: 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. He was an older student than me. 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 a professor. Yeah. I'd be like, hello, professor. Anyway, it was the first week of school. I was learning how to use the library and it was like kind of a mess. Like if you just want to find some journal article so you can do your homework, there are all these sites that you have to go to with different logins. And I was trying to figure all this out when Ziv pulled me aside. He was like, wait, it's so much easier than everything they're telling you. He just sat me down in front of this kind of blank website, super bare bones. It's just like a search field and Sci-Hub written, you know, on top of it. And also there, there is this image of a black raven with a key in its beak. Anyway, you just throw in the paper you want into the search field, click open and it downloads. End of story. 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
SPEAKER_04: anything new.
SPEAKER_03: 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 Sci-Hub 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? But then I started talking to people about Sci-Hub. Are either of you all familiar with a website called Sci-Hub? Yes. Yeah. And I realized, yeah, yeah, it is not just a college kid work around. It's this global network of all kinds of people fighting for access to scientific knowledge. I use Sci-Hub extensively. Hundreds of thousands of papers are downloaded every day.
SPEAKER_01: It is absolutely vital that we protect this resource. In places like India. Sci-Hub in mainland China.
SPEAKER_03: China. I am working.
SPEAKER_01: It's used by scientists, students, journalists, lawyers.
SPEAKER_03: This is something that we need for our jobs.
SPEAKER_03: 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. It's the comparison of the plaque assay on tissue culture. The way mothers use their voice to calm their hospitalized infant. And these are all people who wouldn't have had any way to access this stuff if it weren't for Sci-Hub.
SPEAKER_05: God, I love, I love that this thing exists. It's such a, it's like such a beautiful, open, open door to the world. Is it, is it technically illegal?
SPEAKER_03: Yes, all of those papers are copyrighted and owned and giving them out for free is illegal. 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, for 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. And he was heavily involved in the fight for open access to scientific research. Anyhow, 2010, he was a research fellow at Harvard and he had figured out a way to download all of the scientific papers from JSTOR, which is just one repository for research. And his motivations were like full on utopian. He had actually written this manifesto and in it, he said, those with access to these resources, students, librarians, scientists, you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not indeed morally, you cannot keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. Only those blinded by greed
SPEAKER_03: would refuse to let a friend make a copy. Wow. Yeah. But not long after downloading JSTOR, They went to his apartment, went through all of his personal effects. After he surrendered
SPEAKER_01: 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
SPEAKER_03: have meant like 35 years in jail, million dollar fine, except before the trial was finished.
SPEAKER_00: The body of 26 year old Aaron Swartz was found in his Brooklyn apartment yesterday. The medical examiner says he hanged himself. Swartz was facing
SPEAKER_03: He killed himself in his Brooklyn apartment. Oh, man. I slowly had this process of realizing that all the things around me that people had told
SPEAKER_15: me were just the natural way things were the way things always would be. 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.
SPEAKER_03: This is him back in 2010.
SPEAKER_15: Since 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.
SPEAKER_04: 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 a s***, you know. And wanted to give everyone access.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah. And what he was fighting against is almost like a caricature of capitalist greed.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Well, there are basically five publishers who dominate scholarly article publishing.
SPEAKER_03: That's Jeff Mackey Mason. He's the head librarian at UC Berkeley.
SPEAKER_02: Yes. Campus libraries report to me.
SPEAKER_03: And he told me that while there are some nonprofit groups that publish scientific research, the big four. Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor
SPEAKER_02: and Francis are for-profit publishers.
SPEAKER_03: 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 that publishes. They're
SPEAKER_02: the biggest.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_02: Meaning validated by scholars who are experts in the subject matter that the article is about.
SPEAKER_03: But those peers do it gratis. Generally. It's considered part of our professional service.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So they don't pay the peer reviewers either. Do they pay the writers usually of the journals?
SPEAKER_03: 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. And we actually received comment from most, though not all, of these big five publishers. And their argument was essentially that that work offers a kind of quality control, a standard setting that is essential to the integrity of the research that they're going to publish. You know, they would say that that's a costly and worthwhile contribution. I would say to people, look, the fact that money is going to the publishers is not intrinsically
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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
SPEAKER_02: that we did, that the public paid for, and they're charging us more than the system can afford.
SPEAKER_04: 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 a annoying silicon value. Like it's like this system needs to be disrupted. Like someone needs to disrupt this.
SPEAKER_03: Clearly lots of people have tried. I mean, obviously that's exactly what Aaron Schwartz was trying to do. But the law and society came down on the side of publishers. But then 2011, the year that Aaron Schwartz is indicted, SciHub comes on the scene. And just for context, Aaron downloaded about 4.8 million articles from JSTOR before he was caught. SciHub just blew that out of the water. 88 million articles, basically from every publisher. At its peak, it housed over 90% of every article ever published.
SPEAKER_03: And the entire thing, it is the work of one single person. What? It's just one person? This whole site, as far as we know, the sole operator is this Kazakhstan-y, woman, Alexandra Albakian. What?
SPEAKER_05: And wait, her name again? So she, wait, Alexandra, what's her last name?
SPEAKER_03: Albakian.
SPEAKER_05: And I don't know why I care, but it's not a pen name.
SPEAKER_03: 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. Autobiography. How old is she? She is 33.
SPEAKER_04: What 33-year-olds write autobiographies? Exactly. Wait, do you speak Russian?
SPEAKER_03: No, but we got it translated. It's got this like black background and like green hacker text. And it is just called autobiography 1.1. So Alexandra was born on November 6, 1988. She was born in Almaty, Kazakhstan, which is a former Soviet state.
SPEAKER_03: By age 12, she'd built her first website. By age 14, she'd hacked her first website. She goes to university, ends up getting her degree in computer science. Then she spends a couple of years bouncing around a couple of different labs, some in Germany, in the US, mainly in neuroscience. And it's a little hard to follow here, but she talks about how contributions that she made just didn't get acknowledged. Like she always kind of seems to be getting in fights with her research assistants, with her superiors. Is she just, I mean, knowing what we know of her, like, is she just a disagreeable person?
SPEAKER_04: Well, this is the autobiography.
SPEAKER_03: So from her point of view, it's almost always that other people are too aggressive, too stupid to work with her. But what we know for sure, 2011, Erin Schwartz has been indicted and she starts Sci-Hub. And in only four years, it's getting pretty big and the publishers take her to court, making a pretty simple argument.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_05: It's like a forfeit. It's kind of like a forfeit.
SPEAKER_03: So the judge awards the publishers $15 million in damages.
SPEAKER_05: Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_03: $15 million U.S. dollars. Wow. 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.
SPEAKER_05: Is she being actively protected? Like is Interpol like trying to find her?
SPEAKER_03: 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 also 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. Nothing personal. She's telling you stupid? Yeah, I don't know. 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 until one day, really out of nowhere, I got a message from her. If you want to record it, I will be back in Kazakhstan and we can meet here next weekend. Oh wow.
SPEAKER_06: Whoa.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_04: So what are you going to do?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: 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. So I went to Kazakhstan.
SPEAKER_05: And we will find out what happens when Eli lands.
SPEAKER_04: That's after the break. Stick around.
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SPEAKER_12: server hygiene at the expense of policy issues is history repeating itself?
SPEAKER_08: You can almost see an equation again, I would say, led by the times in Biden being old with Donald Trump being under dozens of felony indictments.
SPEAKER_12: Listen to On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_04: Where in the world is Carmen Clambier? Lulu? Radio Lab? That was my favorite show. It was so good. Loved her hat. Anyway, back to this story.
SPEAKER_05: 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.
SPEAKER_04: Alexandra Elbakyan. She usually lives in hiding, but she has just dared Eli to come see her face to face in Kazakhstan.
SPEAKER_03: A few days later, I was traveling from San Francisco to Kazakhstan.
SPEAKER_03: So left on a Wednesday afternoon, got in Friday morning, sleep straight through a third day because I'm so jet lagged. Wake up Saturday morning and we've got the interview. Hello, 123123. Alrighty, here I am in front of the Best Western Plus. I am 12 minutes away from meeting Alexandra Elbakyan. Oh man. So we agreed to meet at this roundabout in front of my hotel, kind of surrounded by gray nondescript buildings and this huge Soviet archway. There were cars buzzing around, people milling about. I told her I'm out by the big archway by the road intersection. Now, I'm still a little bit terrified that she is not going to show up. I wonder, has she seen my message? And so I'm standing out there just waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Ah, f***.
SPEAKER_03: 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. So nice to finally meet you. I expected you to be a girl. To be what? A girl. To be a girl? Yes.
SPEAKER_11: Oh really?
SPEAKER_05: So it's very surprising. 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 had like
SPEAKER_03: she was just like, yeah, whatever. I just I had like, I don't know how to say in English, an impression.
SPEAKER_03: Anyhow, we started walking towards her aunt's apartment where we were going to sit down and talk. And it was this very basic gray five story concrete box apartment building.
SPEAKER_13: Hello.
SPEAKER_03: And uh,
SPEAKER_14: Which tea do you like? Oh. Black? Black. Black.
SPEAKER_03: 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? Good. You feel ready?
SPEAKER_14: Good to go? It's good.
SPEAKER_03: 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?
SPEAKER_06: No.
SPEAKER_03: Even if you were a Russian spy, what would you tell me?
SPEAKER_14: No.
SPEAKER_03: Why do you think that?
SPEAKER_14: 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.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_14: Well actually, at first when the hub started, I just was doing it because it was fun. And I felt happy.
SPEAKER_03: Can you say more about that?
SPEAKER_14: Perhaps I'm not very good at describing feelings, but perhaps I…
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_14: 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. And I found the school boring. Maybe I was depressed or something like that.
SPEAKER_03: But this feeling followed her through her academic career. You know, I mentioned that she studied in the US, 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.
SPEAKER_14: So I think maybe this is just what kind of a person I was.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_14: And there were dozens of posts there with people saying, I'm doing this and this research.
SPEAKER_03: I need this and that paper. I'm not affiliated with a Western university. I need access.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_14: Something like a game, but also... Pretty quickly. Like for me, it became some kind of a social activity.
SPEAKER_14: 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. Then they replied, thank you very much. And I felt good about that.
SPEAKER_03: She actually wrote about this moment in her autobiography. She says, for the first time, thank you was said to me.
SPEAKER_06: Wow. Like somebody actually was grateful for the work that I had done.
SPEAKER_14: Yeah. So just monitor. New request appear. And then you quickly get a message from the computer. But the faster she got at this, it seemed.
SPEAKER_07: I'm looking for courtesies.
SPEAKER_07: Urgent, I need fire.
SPEAKER_03: The more requests there were pouring in. Until eventually, she kind of gets to thinking, hey, why do I need to sit here and do this manually? I could probably write some code that automates all of this. So just to get technical for a minute here.
SPEAKER_14: More clever to have some program that you can.
SPEAKER_03: She really just paired two ideas. One was something called a proxy server, which just makes it look like her computer is at the university or something. And then number two is she set up this rotating list of logins that had access to all the library databases. She needed these logins are the subject of much controversy. Where does she get them? How does she maintain them? How do they not get shut down? She told me she just buys them on this website. Are they expensive?
SPEAKER_14: It depends on the university. Some costs, for example, like seven or twelve US dollars.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_03: Boom. Sci-hub is born.
SPEAKER_14: And immediately became, how to say, popular. The website Sci-hub.
SPEAKER_08: Sci-hub. Sci-hub. It is Sci-hub. What would you do if Sci-hub?
SPEAKER_14: So first this 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.
SPEAKER_03: And requests started coming in from all over the world. Italy, Sweden, Chinese, India, Iranian.
SPEAKER_14: A server dedicated to offerings.
SPEAKER_03: By 2019, Sci-hub is netting almost half a million downloads every day from practically every country in the world. Is there a voice in the back of your mind that thinks like, this is a little bit risky, like this could be dangerous?
SPEAKER_14: No.
SPEAKER_03: No?
SPEAKER_14: No. Why?
SPEAKER_03: I mean, but you knew what had happened to, for instance, like Aaron Schwartz. Yes, of course.
SPEAKER_14: But I remember I didn't pay a lot of attention.
SPEAKER_03: You didn't, you just didn't think that that could happen to you?
SPEAKER_14: No.
SPEAKER_06: So, yeah, maybe I was a little bit naive, but I thought that Sci-hub is going to overthrow
SPEAKER_14: the academic publishing and the copyright system. Yes, I think.
SPEAKER_06: Now, of course that didn't happen.
SPEAKER_03: But she says even still, when she was sued in 2015, she didn't consider taking the site down. No. Why not? Like, make the threat go away?
SPEAKER_14: Perhaps, but Sci-hub at that point, it was necessary.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_14: For example, they run a few under sanctions, so they couldn't legally buy the subscriptions.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_04: Including potentially shutting the site down. Yes.
SPEAKER_03: Or she could double down, skip out on the trial altogether, and become a wanted woman.
SPEAKER_14: So I sent a letter to the judge where I explained reasons why I started Sci-hub website, that copyright is a law that works against the signs that all people should have the right to acknowledge, and that hence I would not participate in this case.
SPEAKER_04: She chose being a wanted woman?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. But then, five years later, Alexandra made a very different decision. So in December of 2020, a group of three publishers, Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society, they filed suit against Sci-hub in India. Now at this point, Alexandra, she sort of becomes famous for not defending herself. So when the first hearing opens up on Christmas Eve in the Delhi High Court in New Delhi, no one expects her to show up. But then, at almost the last possible moment, this literal kid, 27 years old, just a few years out of law school, enters the courtroom.
SPEAKER_04: Wait, you're allowed to say that because how old are you again? 25. Yeah, so you're a kid too.
SPEAKER_03: Okay. He stands up. He basically says, I will be representing Ms. Elbakyan in the case against Sci-hub, and nobody knows who he is.
SPEAKER_13: So my official name is Nilesh Ashokumajan, but I go by Nilesh.
SPEAKER_03: So I got a hold of Nilesh Jain, who is a lawyer, though not a copyright lawyer per se. I'm a robe lawyer.
SPEAKER_03: But he says as soon as he saw Sci-hub being sued, he immediately knew he had to step up to defend it.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah. So I grew up in a very small, it's not even a town, it's a village near Udaipur, Rajasthan.
SPEAKER_03: That's up in the northwest of the country, sort of on the border with Pakistan?
SPEAKER_13: And I wanted to get out of that, all of it. I just wanted to go to Delhi, and I think that's it.
SPEAKER_03: So he got to Delhi, got a job, and he wanted to study law. But I had no money to buy all this.
SPEAKER_13: Research books on law means 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.
SPEAKER_03: And on December 22nd, 2020, he sees a tweet. I saw this tweet that there's a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Sci-hub
SPEAKER_13: in India. I just posted a bit news on Twitter saying that Sci-hub can be blocked in India in a
SPEAKER_14: few days.
SPEAKER_13: And I was pissed because Sci-hub was a very important site to me.
SPEAKER_03: So when Nilesh saw that the tweet was from Alexandra herself, he reached out immediately.
SPEAKER_13: I contacted her via messenger, the Twitter messenger. Then I asked her, do you have any lawyer in Delhi?
SPEAKER_03: Had lawyers ever reached out before?
SPEAKER_14: No. Gotcha, gotcha.
SPEAKER_03: It was like first time.
SPEAKER_03: But Nilesh offers to represent her by himself for free.
SPEAKER_13: And by end of the day, we were talking about the case, the implication and everything.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_03: So there is actually a very famous precedent for this kind of case in Indian law.
SPEAKER_07: Delhi University photocopy case.
SPEAKER_03: So Oxford University Press basically sues this copy shop for letting people make copies of academic books. And the case went to the same Delhi High Court, which ruled what the copy shop is doing is 100% legal due to an educational exception. And so Nilesh basically said to her that you might just have a chance here. So I...
SPEAKER_14: Perhaps if it was a very small country, perhaps I would just didn't pay attention to it.
SPEAKER_03: But you knew that you had a lot of users in India? Yes. About how many?
SPEAKER_14: It was about 800,000 in a month, something like that.
SPEAKER_13: Wow. If we'll get a relief in our favor, this will be huge, huge relief all over the world, not just India.
SPEAKER_03: So Alexandra was like, maybe I should show up this time.
SPEAKER_14: I don't know. I want to be accepted as a legal solution in all countries of the world.
SPEAKER_03: And the only way you're going to do that is if you win somewhere?
SPEAKER_14: Yeah. We have to start winning.
SPEAKER_03: 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. And for this random guy who nobody has ever heard of to show up...
SPEAKER_13: I'm representing Alexandra Al Bikyan.
SPEAKER_03: Really stunned everybody?
SPEAKER_06: Yes, sir, sir.
SPEAKER_03: 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.
SPEAKER_09: How's your morning?
SPEAKER_03: Because, well, to be honest, I really thought that this would be the big showdown. She had finally showed up. You know, the case was finally going to result in a decision, some decision. I mean, we would land somewhere.
SPEAKER_01: But they kept switching judges one to another.
SPEAKER_03: I think we might be on the fourth judge at this point. Then it'll get done.
SPEAKER_02: But if after two, then it won't get done.
SPEAKER_13: It got deferred adjourned again, again, again, till...
SPEAKER_06: Oh my God.
SPEAKER_03: Now it just seems to be sort of stuck in this bureaucratic hole.
SPEAKER_13: This is what happens in Indian judicial system. Cases in India go on for years and years before the final judgment and all. But that means you could still win eventually, right?
SPEAKER_03: 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. This is an understanding that SciHub won't upload new articles until we decide the case.
SPEAKER_03: While the case is going on, SciHub can't add any new scientific papers to their database. And it's been over two years now. Do you worry that waiting so long could maybe have a bad effect on SciHub because people would no longer think that it has the latest research?
SPEAKER_14: Well, it depends. SciHub is going to remain as a kind of a museum. And yes.
SPEAKER_03: Wait, sorry, as a museum. What do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_14: I mean that they should contain... I think what surprised me was that she had just geared up for the biggest fight of SciHub's
SPEAKER_03: 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 SciHub might not be all that relevant anymore and that she might not need to keep it up anymore.
SPEAKER_14: The website should contain a history of SciHub and the fight for access to academic papers and so on.
SPEAKER_03: You say preserve the history of the open access movement. It almost seems to imply that the movement is coming to a close.
SPEAKER_14: Well, perhaps.
SPEAKER_03: I'm starting to learn a little bit more what you mean when you say perhaps.
SPEAKER_04: But I still use it. Millions of people still use it all over the world all the time. Well, SciHub disappears, that will be an immense loss. Well, that's true.
SPEAKER_03: But in the time since she created it, I mean, since 2011, things have really started to change.
SPEAKER_14: Today, more than 50% of new academic papers are already published in open access.
SPEAKER_03: 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 SciHub 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.
SPEAKER_02: 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.
SPEAKER_03: This is once again, UC Berkeley's Jeff Mackey-Mason. Pay them enough to be in business and get a rate of return.
SPEAKER_02: But then once we've paid them to publish, the deal is that they make it available for free online. So I could, I could in theory go read a UC-authored article at this point.
SPEAKER_03: Okay, I see.
SPEAKER_02: And if Harvard pays to publish Harvard articles, if the University of Munich pays to publish University of Munich articles, if everybody does that, then there's no charge to read anything.
SPEAKER_03: At the same time, the US government has also decided to put its weight behind open access.
SPEAKER_11: All right, welcome everybody. Thank you for joining us for this virtual community forum.
SPEAKER_03: August 25, 2022, the Biden administration announced their new policy on federally funded research.
SPEAKER_10: Open government and open science and research are an essential part of the Biden-Harris administration's broader commitment to providing public access to data, publications.
SPEAKER_03: So what it means is that by 2026, every paper that gets federal funding is going to be made free for anyone, anywhere, immediately. I think Sci-Hub, the pressure it put on the publishers, in just setting an example, like giving people a glimpse of this world where academic research could be free, I think it kind of, yeah, it opened the door a little bit. It cracked the door. So it's almost like Sci-Hub might be losing the battle, but open access is winning the
SPEAKER_04: war. Maybe.
SPEAKER_03: 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?
SPEAKER_14: Next? Well, I also have many other ideas I thought about, apart from Sci-Hub.
SPEAKER_03: Could you tell me some of those?
SPEAKER_14: Well, for example, I was thinking about like creating my own research institute where we are going to study immortality problem. Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_03: I mean, beyond just being a really good computer programmer, she's also a very serious scientist.
SPEAKER_14: Being somewhere in parallel to Sci-Hub.
SPEAKER_03: Especially in neuroscience. I actually remember in her autobiography, she has a whole section about this concept of hers called the global brain.
SPEAKER_03: 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She admits openly that this is a very ambitious idea and the technical details are somewhat – 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
SPEAKER_03: her. Does it upset you, everything you've had to give up to make this website?
SPEAKER_14: Maybe it limited my life in some respect.
SPEAKER_03: 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?
SPEAKER_14: Those are kind of things that are hard to explain.
SPEAKER_03: Would you mind trying for me?
SPEAKER_14: 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.
SPEAKER_03: For example, what would happen if you came to America today?
SPEAKER_14: That would be not the best option.
SPEAKER_03: Are there any other countries that you've wanted to go to, but you have to –
SPEAKER_14: 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.
SPEAKER_04: Thank you, Eli.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, no problem.
SPEAKER_04: 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
SPEAKER_05: Adler.
SPEAKER_04: It was mixed by Jeremy Blum. And it was edited by international woman of mystery, Alex Neeson.
SPEAKER_04: Who personally owes me millions of dollars. Special thanks to Vrindra Bandari, Balaj Bodo, Steven Buranyi, Ian Graber-Steel, Joel Joseph, Nureyn Khalifa, Steve McLaughlin, Aparajita Lutt, Marsha McNutt, Randy Schekman, and Tan Mei Sing. This is Radiolab, which will continue to be free for everyone around the world. I'm Lulu Miller. I'm Latif Nasr.
SPEAKER_05: Thanks for listening.
SPEAKER_09: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasr are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blum, Becca Bresler, Rachel Cusick, Aketi Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz-Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanasambandhan, Matt Cutie, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khare, Ana Rascuette-Paz, Sarah Sandback, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vinales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.
SPEAKER_07: Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Student support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Simon Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation.
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