# Alexandra Elbakyan ![[50 Resources/51 Attachments/51.03 Public/2026-05-04 Alexandra Elbakyan.jpg|400]] Kazakh-born computer scientist and programmer. Founded [[Sci-Hub]] in 2011 while a graduate student frustrated by paywalls blocking the research papers she needed for her own work. Built and operated the platform mostly alone, despite lawsuits from Elsevier (2015) and the American Chemical Society (2017), domain seizures, and asset freezes. She frames her work as a continuation of the open access movement rather than piracy; the argument is that publicly funded research should be publicly accessible, and that locking it behind subscription walls slows down science especially for researchers in low-income countries. The position has earned her comparisons to [[Aaron Swartz]] and made her both a folk hero in academia and a defendant in major copyright cases. Currently lives in Russia, which has so far refused to extradite her. In 2025 she launched [[Sci-Net]], a peer-to-peer platform for researchers to fulfill paper requests for each other when Sci-Hub's corpus falls short. In 2026, Sci-Hub launched [[Sci-Bot]], an AI assistant grounded in its full-text corpus. ## Quotes <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/quote AND [[Alexandra Elbakyan]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Books <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/book AND [[Alexandra Elbakyan]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Related - [[Sci-Hub]] - [[Sci-Bot]] - [[Sci-Net]] - [[Aaron Swartz]] ## References - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan - Sci-Hub personal page: https://sci-hub.ee/alexandra/ - Science magazine profile: https://www.science.org/content/article/frustrated-science-student-behind-sci-hub - Ness Labs interview: https://nesslabs.com/alexandra-elbakyan-interview