Radiolab - The Library of Alexandra

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

How much does knowledge cost? While that sounds like an abstract question, the answer is surprisingly specific: $3,096,988,440.00. That’s how much the business of publishing scientific and academic research is worth.  This is the story of one woman’s battle against a global network of academic journals that underlie published scientific research. In 2011, Alexandra Elbakyan had just moved home to Kazakhstan after a disappointing few years trying to study neuroscience in the United States when she landed on an internet forum where a bunch of scientists were all looking for the same thing: access to academic journal articles that were behind paywalls. That’s the moment the very simple, but enormously powerful, website called Sci Hub was born.  The site holds over 88 million articles and serves up about a million downloads to people in practically every country on the globe. We travel to Kazakhstan to meet the mysterious woman behind it all and to find out what it takes to make everything we know about anything available to anyone anywhere, for free.Special thanks to Vrindra Bhandari, Balázs Bodó, Stephen Buranyi, Ian Graber-Stiehl, Joel Joseph, Noorain Khalifa, Aparajita Lath, Steve McLaughlin, Marcia McNutt, Randy Scheckman Tanmay Singh, Deborah Harkness, Joe Karaganis, Lawrence Lessig, Glyn Moody, and Steven Press. Episode Credits:Reported by - Eli CohenReporting help from - Karishma Mehrotra, Emily Krumberger and Norihelys RamosProduced by Simon Adlerwith help from - Eli CohenOriginal music and sound designed by - Simon AdlerMixing by - Jeremy BloomEdited by - Alex Neason Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Radiolab is on YouTube! Catch up with new episodes and hear classics from our archive. Plus, find other cool things we did in the past — like miniseries, music videos, short films and animations, behind-the-scenes features, Radiolab live shows, and more. Take a look, explore and subscribe! Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail].   Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  

Just a heads up, the following story does include a brief discussion of suicide. Please listen with care. Oh wait, you're listening. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. You're listening to Radio Lab.

Radio Lab. From W and Y. Six! Six! Hello. Hello. hello, hello. One, two, one, two, one, two. We're gonna get some, get some labels, get some labels. Hey, get some labels, get some labels.

Hello. I'm Lula Miller. I'm Lottifnosser. Today on Radio Lab, pirates. Science. And the fight to make everything we know about anything available to everyone. Anywhere.

Yeah, wait, so 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, you like going. Okay, we can always change the beginning. Okay, so basically how I remember it is,

I think SiHub came up in a pitch meeting at some point. I don't remember exactly how, let's if maybe you do. I'm, well, I just know, I'm the, and I don't even know for legally a lot to say this, but like I am the Sy 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 Sy Hub. 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 he was 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 kind of a mess. 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 in Syhub written, you know, on top of it. And also there is this image of a black raven with a key in it's 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 a cornerstone of how I do my job. And really just how I learn anything new. Yeah, look, I mean, at that point, if you're not at a university,

these articles are like 20 to $100. I mean, sometimes more, just for a single article. But on SyHub, it's 100% free. That's right. That's right. And I don't know. 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 SI Hub. Are either of you all familiar with a website called SI Hub? Yes. And I realized, 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 I have extensively. Hundreds of thousands of papers are downloaded every day. It is absolutely vital that we protect this resource.

In places like India, China, it ham, a male and a China. China. It's used by scientists, students, journalists, lawyers. 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. The Harrison of the plaque, Passe, Untissue 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 Sihah. Oh 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, 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 JStore, 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 would refuse to let a friend make a copy Mm-hmm. Wow. Yeah But not long after downloading J. Store they went away as apartment went through all of his personal effects after he surrendered went through all of his personal effects. After he surrendered, voluntarily, they arrested him, they stripped search term, 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, except before the trial was finished. 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 a problem. He killed himself in his Brooklyn apartment. Oh, man. Yeah.

I slowly have this process of realizing that all the things around me that people had told 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 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. This is back in 2010.

Once I realized that there were real serious problems, fundamental problems, that I could do something you 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 seem to just be like a promising human being. Like this was a guy who gave a sh**, 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, they're 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, the Taylor and Francis, are four profit publishers. And they're like these huge conglomerates of a bunch of kind of scientific journals. They have broad portfolios. You know, Elsevier has over 2,500 different journals that 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, grat us. 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 journal? No, it's the researchers who are doing the writing. They are paying for the work of maintaining a journal, 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 gonna 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 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 a annoying silicon, like it's like this system needs to be disrupted. Like someone needs to disrupt this. Well, 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. But then, 2011, the year that Aaron Schwartz is indicted, Syhub comes on the scene. And just for context, Aaron downloaded about 4.8 million articles from JStore before he was caught. Syhub 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. Wow. And the entire thing, it is the work of one single person. It's just one person. Just one person. This whole site, as far as we know, the sole operator is this

Kazakhstani woman Alexandra Elbachev. What? And we her name again. So she we Alexandra. What's her last name? Elbachev. And I don't know why I care, but it's not a pen name. So so I'm 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, auto-biogee. Auto biography. How old is she? She is 33. What 33 year olds right out of myography? Exactly. Do you speak Russian?

No, but we got it translated. Oh, yeah. It's got this black background and green hacker text. And it is just called autobiography 1.1. So Alexander was born on November 6, 1988. She was born in Almati, Kazakhstan, which is a former Soviet state. 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 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? 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. But what we know for sure, 2011, Aaron Schwartz has been indicted, and she starts Sihub. And in only four years, it's getting pretty big, and the publishers take her to court, making a pretty simple argument. Sihub 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 US dollars. Wow.

That she clearly does not ask. 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? Like is Interpol like trying to find her?

So the FBI definitely thinks she's being protected by the Russians. Okay. 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. I was gonna tell some 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 to her. How are you stupid? Yeah, I don't know. No, 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 be here next weekend. 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 gonna 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 has this combination of Robin Hood, Carmen San Diego, Edward Snowden, all wrapped into

one. So I went to Kazakhstan. And we will find out what happens when Eli lands. That's after the break. Stick around. Shelf the Lord, love the sun in the hour of the sun! Where in the world is Garmin's family? There you go. Lulu? Lateth. Radio Lab? 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 San Diego Edward Snowden Robin Hood-esque figure at the center of the website, Sihop. Alexandra Elbachion. She usually lives in hiding, but she is just dared Eli to come see her face-to-face in Kazakhstan. A few days later, I was traveling from San Francisco to Kazakhstan.

So, left on a Wednesday afternoon, got in Friday morning, sleep straight through the third day because I'm so jet lagged. Wake up Saturday morning and... ...we've got the interview. Hello, one, two, three, one, two, three. Alrighty, here I am in front of the best western plus. I am 12 minutes away from meeting Alexandra Elbachian. 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. 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 expect it to be a girl. To be what? A girl. To be a girl.

Yes. Oh really? It's a very surprising. Oh, I'm so sorry. Oh, the whole time. Right. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha clear that she had done no real looking into me or like she was like, yeah, whatever. I just had like, I don't know how to see in English and impression. Anyhow, we started walking towards her on-suppartment where we were going to sit down and talk.

We are in Moscow. And it was this very basic gray five-story concrete box apartment building. And... What do you like about the old green one? 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? Are you, you feel ready?

Good to go. It's so good. Okay. Great. Well, to start out, then, there have been accusations from the United States Justice Department at 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 got to 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 Sejab stopped it, I just was doing it because it was fun. And I felt happy. Can you say more about that? I feel very good at describing feelings, but perhaps... Going back all the way to when she was a kid, she said, she'd always found it 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 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. 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, a forum molecule biology. And there were dozens of posts there with people saying, I'm doing this in this research, I need this in 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 to sort of a casual activity. Something like a game, but also...

Pretty quickly. Like for me, it became some kind of a social activity. And it was a way to connect to people. Because, you know, sending academic papers calls it a lot of to connect to people. Because, you know, sending academic papers 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. She actually wrote about this moment in her autobiography. She says, for the first time, thank you was said to me. Like somebody actually was grateful for the work that I had done. Yes, so just monitor. You can understand me, but my sound is high. New request appeared. And then you quickly solve it.

request appeared and then you quickly solve it. But the faster she got at this it seemed. The more requests there were pouring in, until eventually she kind of gets into thinking, hey, why? 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, I'm going to have some program that you can really just pair two ideas. One was something called a proxy server, which just makes it look like her computer is at the university or something. And the 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? It depends on the university. Some cost, for example, like $712 US dollars. 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, um, did it didn't work? Uh, do my surprise? Yes, it did work. Boom, Syub is born. And immediately became how to say popular. became how to say popular. The website Sihah. Sihah. Sihah. It is on Hop-Hop.

So, first day it was like maybe a couple of thousand requests per day from Russia, but after that, the website spread to other forums and requests started coming in from all over the world. Italy, Sweden, Chinese, India, Iranians, and requests started coming in from all over the world. Italy, Sweden, Cheney, India, Irania. By 2019, Sihab 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 risky like this could be dangerous?

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 didn't, you just didn't think that that could happen to you? No.

So, yeah, maybe I was a little naive, but I saw that the hub is going to overthrow the academic publishing and the copyright system. Yes, I think. the copyright system. I'm sorry. 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 I have at that point, it was necessary. Like, Syhub 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, if you are on 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, suffered the consequences, including potentially shutting this idea down. Yes, or she could double down, skip out on the trial altogether and become a wanted woman.

So I sent a letter to the judge where I explained reasons why I started Psycha website that copyright is a low, that works against science, that all people should have the right to acknowledge and that hence I would not participate in this case. She chose being a wanted woman? Yeah. But then, five years later, Alexandra made a very different decision. So, in December of 2020,

a group of three publishers, El Sevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society, they file suit against Syhub 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. You're allowed to say that because how old are you again?

25. Yeah. He stands up. He basically says, I will be representing Miss Elbacchian in the case against Sa'hub. And nobody knows who he is. So, uh, my official name is Nileisha Shokumajin, but I go by Nile. So, I got a hold of Nileh Jain, who is a lawyer, though not a copy, right, lawyer, per se. I'm a rob lawyer. But he says, as soon as he saw Sihab 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 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 the alien. I think that's it. So we got to Delhi, got a job and he wanted to study law. But I had no money to buy all this research books on law. This is very expensive. So I did all the research for master's course from Syub. Nilesh basically says that Syub was the key to him getting through law school. Wow.

And on December 22nd, 2020, he sees a tweet. So this tweet that there's a corporate infringement lawsuit filed against Syub in India. They just posted a bit new soon Twitter saying that Syub can be blocked in India in a few days. And I was pissed because Syub was very important side to me. So when Nilesh saw that the tweet was from Alexandra herself, he reached out immediately. Contact 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. Delhi University, photo copy. When you actually copy the actual property, it's a bit...

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 a 100% legal due to an educational exception. And so Nileh basically said to her that you might just have a chance here.

So I... If it was a very small country, if perhaps I just didn't pay attention to it. But you knew that you had a lot of users in India, about how many? It was about 800,000 in a month, something like that. Wow. If we will 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 say, 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. Uh, yeah. We have to start winning. So just two days after we first talk to Alexandra, Nieless 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. I'm representing Silesandr Albacan. Really stunned everybody.

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 Marocha, to check in with Nilesh as the case proceeded. How's your morning? 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 gonna result in a decision, some decision. I mean, we would land somewhere. But they kept switching judges one to another. I think we might be on the fourth judge at this point. Then it'll get done, but if after two, then it won't get done. It got deferred, it turned again, again, again, till... Oh my God.

Now it just seems to be sort of stuck in this bureaucratic hole. This is what happens in the judicial system. K-cases in India go on for years and years before the final judgment and all. But that means you can 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. This is an understanding that, uh, Syub won't upload new articles until we decide the case.

While the case is going on, Syub 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 SyHub? Because people would no longer think that it has the latest research. Well, it depends. Perhaps SyHub is going to remain as a kind of a museum. And yes. Oh, wait, sorry, as a museum. What do you mean by that? I mean that it should contain the... I think what surprised me was that she had just geared up for the biggest fight of Sejup's life

up for the biggest fight of Syhub'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 Syhub 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 SyHUB 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, it happens. 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. Well, Siob 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, huh? Oh, without the whole illegal part of what Sy Hub does. Now of course, they still wanna 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, I could in theory, go read UC author article at this point. Okay, I see. And Harvard pays to publish Harvard articles. If the University of Munich pays to publish University of Munich articles, if everybody does that, and there's no charge to read anything. At the same time, the US government has also decided to put its weight behind open access. All right, welcome everybody.

Thank you for joining us for this virtual community forum. August 25th, 2022, the Biden administration announced their new policy on federally funded research. 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. 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 Sy 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,

but it cracked the door. So it's almost like, Syhub 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 Syhub 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 saw about apart from Seihab. Could you tell me some of those? Well, for example, I was thinking about like creating my own research institute where I was 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. Stading somewhere in parallel to Seihab.

Especially in neuroscience. I actually remember in her autobiography, she's a whole section about this concept of hers called the global brain. Hmm. 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she admits openly that this is a very ambitious idea and the technical details are somewhat like how you plug in. Yes. 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 Syhub, 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? So, a kind of thing that I have to explain. Would you mind trying for me? As I said, so, a kind of thing that I have 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 a not a best option.

Are there any countries that you... other countries maybe that you've wanted to go to, but you have to... 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 Marothra. 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 Niesen. Who personally owes me millions of dollars. Special thanks to Vindra Bandari, Belag Bodo, Stephen Burrani,

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