Scientific knowledge belongs to humanity.
Seriously, I feel more like a revolutionary because the final goal is not only to download all the articles and books and give open access to them, but to change legislation is such a way that free distribution of research papers will not face any legal obstacles.
What was especially surprising for me is that there are many people who view Sci-Hub as some kind of a tool to change the system. Like changing the system was a goal, and Sci-Hub was a tool to achieve it.
There is the possibility to be suddenly arrested for hacking.
There should be no obstacles to accessing knowledge.
I like their slogan 'making uncommon knowledge common' very much, but as far as I can tell Elsevier has not mastered this job well. Sci-Hub is helping them to fulfill their mission.
Elsevier operates by racket: if you do not send money, you will not read any papers. On my website, any person can read as many papers as they want for free, and sending donations is their free will. Why Elsevier cannot work like this, I wonder?
Providing free access to research papers on websites like Sci-Hub breaks so-called copyright law that was made to taboo free distribution of information on the Internet. That includes music, movies, documentaries, books, and research articles. Not everyone agrees that copyright law should exist in the first place.
I know there are some reasons to suspect me: after all, I have education in computer security and was a hobby hacker in teenage years. But hacking is not my occupation, and I do not have any job within any intelligence, either Russian or some another.
It's useful to know how to go around domain blocking.
Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science.
Science should belong to scientists and not the publishers.
I started programming before even being in school.
I started a crowdfunding campaign on Sci-Hub to buy additional drives, and soon had my own copy of the database collected by LibGen, around 21 million papers.
I do know about stories where hackers that left Russia or Ukraine for Europe or the United States were unexpectedly arrested.
I had the idea to use electrical potential collected from the surface of the heat that our brain generates, it's like authentication using the power of thoughts. Imagine if you could use a thought instead of a password.
I think that whether I can be a Russian spy is being investigated by U.S. government since they learned about Sci-Hub, because that is very logical: a Russian project, that uses university accounts to access some information, of course that is suspicious. But in fact Sci-Hub has always been my personal enterprise.
I've always considered myself to be Russian: my native language is Russian.
Sci-Hub arose as a tool to be used in a Russian-speaking online research community.
Journal paywalls are an example of something that works in the reverse direction, making communication less open and efficient.
