LULU MILLER: Just a head's up, the following story does include a brief discussion of suicide. Please listen with care.

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ELI COHEN: [singing] Hello, hello, hello, hello. One two one two one two one two one two. We're gonna get some—get some levels. Get some levels.

LULU: [singing] Get some levels.

ELI: Hey! [laughs]

LULU: [singing] Get some levels. Get some levels. Hi!

ELI: Hello!

LULU: I'm Lulu Miller.

LATIF NASSER: I'm Latif Nasser.

LULU: Today on Radiolab, pirates ...

LATIF: ... science ...

LULU: ... and the fight to make everything we know about anything available to everyone ...

LATIF: ... anywhere.

ELI: Yeah, wait. So where—where are we supposed to start? Are we supposed to start with a little Kazakhstan report? Are we supposed ...

LATIF: Start like you—yeah.

LATIF: Comes to us from reporter ...

LATIF: However you feel comfortable.

LULU: Yes.

LATIF: ... Eli Cohen.

ELI: Okay.

LULU: We can always change the beginning.

ELI: 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.

LATIF: I'm—well, 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 Sci-Hub evangelist on staff.

LULU: [laughs]

LATIF: 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 Sci-Hub.

ELI: 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.

LATIF: Okay.

ELI: 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."

LULU: Like, he called you Professor?

ELI: Yeah, he'd be like, "Hello, Professor!" [laughs] Anyway, it was the first week of school. I was learning how to use the library. And it was kind of a mess.

LATIF: Hmm.

ELI: Like, if you want to just find some journal article so you can do your homework, there are all these sites that you go to with different logins. And I was trying to figure all this out, when Ziv pulled me aside and 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 is this image of a black raven with a key in its beak.

LULU: Hmm.

ELI: Anyway, you just throw in the paper you want into the search field, click "Open," and it downloads. End of story.

LATIF: Yeah, exactly! It's so simple!

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

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

ELI: Mm-hmm. 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 Sci-Hub it's 100 percent free.

LATIF: That's right. That's right.

ELI: 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?"

LATIF: [laughs]

ELI: But then I started talking to people about Sci-Hub.

ELI: Are either of you all familiar with a website called Sci-Hub?

UNIVERSITY STUDENT: Yes.

UNIVERSITY STUDENT: Yeah.

ELI: And I realized ...

UNIVERSITY STUDENT: Yeah. Yeah.

ELI: ... it is not just a college kid workaround, it's this global network of all kinds of people fighting for access to scientific knowledge.

UNIVERSITY STUDENT: I use Sci-Hub extensively.

ELI: Hundreds of thousands of papers are downloaded every day.

UNIVERSITY STUDENT: It is absolutely vital that we protect this resource.

ELI: In places like India ...

UNIVERSITY STUDENT: Yeah, we have Sci-Hub in mainland China.

ELI: ... China. It's used by scientists, students, journalists, lawyers ...

UNIVERSITY STUDENT: This is something that we need for our jobs.

ELI: ... 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 way mothers use their voice to calm their hospitalized infants.

LULU: Hmm.

ELI: And these are all people who wouldn't have had any way to access this stuff if it weren't for Sci-Hub.

LULU: [sighs] 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?

ELI: Yes. All of those papers are copyrighted and owned and giving them out for free is illegal.

LULU: Okay.

ELI: And this is a battle that's been going on for decades, you know, this fight 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 Swartz?

LATIF: Yes. Yeah, sure.

LULU: Hmm, I'm not sure I do.

ELI: So Aaron Swartz, 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.

LATIF: Yeah.

ELI: 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 would refuse to let a friend make a copy."

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: Wow. Yeah.

ELI: But not long after downloading JSTOR ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Robert Swartz: They went into 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.]

ELI: 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 ...

[NEWS CLIP: 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 federal trial next month …]

ELI: ... he killed himself in his Brooklyn apartment.

LULU: Oh.

LATIF: Oof!

LULU: Man!

LATIF: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Aaron Swartz: You know, 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 that more importantly were wrong and should change.]

ELI: This is him back in 2010.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Aaron Swartz: Once I realized that there were real serious problems, fundamental problems that I could do something to address, I didn't see a way that—to forget that. I didn't see a way not to.]

LATIF: 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 promising human being. Like, this was a guy who, like, gave a shit, you know?

LULU: And wanted to give everyone access.

LATIF: Yeah!

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

JEFF MACKIE-MASON: Yeah. Well, there are basically five publishers who dominate scholarly article publishing.

ELI: That's Jeff MacKie-Mason. He's the head librarian at UC-Berkeley.

JEFF MACKIE-MASON: Yes. Campus libraries report to me.

ELI: And he told me that, while there are some non-profit groups that publish scientific research, the big four ...

JEFF MACKIE-MASON: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis are for-profit publishers.

ELI: And they are like these huge conglomerates of a bunch of kinds of scientific journals.

JEFF MACKIE-MASON: They have broad portfolios. You know, Elsevier has over 2,500 different journals it publishes. They're the biggest.

ELI: 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.

LATIF: Yep.

ELI: No expense there. Now all academic research needs to be peer reviewed.

JEFF MACKIE-MASON: Meaning validated by scholars who are experts in the subject matter that the article is about.

ELI: But those peers do it gratis.

JEFF MACKIE-MASON: Generally it's considered part of our professional service, yeah.

ELI: So they don't pay the peer reviewers either. They ...

LATIF: Do they pay the writers, usually, of the journals?

ELI: 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.

LATIF: Okay.

ELI: 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.

JEFF MACKIE-MASON: I—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.

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

JEFF MACKIE-MASON: Yeah. I mean, this is—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.

LATIF: 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.

ELI: Well, clearly lots of people have tried. I mean, obviously that's exactly what Aaron Swartz was trying to do.

LULU: Yeah.

ELI: But the law and society came down on the side of the publishers. But then 2011, the year that Aaron Swartz is indicted, Sci-Hub comes on the scene. And just for context: Aaron downloaded about 4.8 million articles from JSTOR before he was caught. Sci-Hub just blew that out of the water—88 million articles basically from every publisher. At its peak, it housed over 90 percent of every article ever published.

LULU: Wow!

ELI: And the entire thing, it is the work of one single person.

LULU: What?

LATIF: It's just one person?

LULU: Wait, this whole ...?

ELI: This whole site. As far as we know, the sole operator is this Kazakhstani woman, Alexandra Elbakyan.

LULU: What? And wait, her name again? So she—wait. Alexandra. What's her last name?

ELI: Elbakyan.

LULU: And I don't know why I care, but is—it's not a pen name. It's not like ...

ELI: 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—auto—autobiography.

LULU: Autobiography?

LATIF: What? How old is she?

ELI: She is 33.

LATIF: What 33 year olds write autobiographies?

LULU: [laughs]

ELI: Exactly.

LATIF: Wait, do you speak Russian?

ELI: No, but we got it translated.

LATIF: Okay.

LULU: Oh, wow.

ELI: It's got this, like, black background and, like, green hacker text.

LATIF: Oh.

ELI: And it is just called Autobiography 1.1.

LATIF: 1.1.

LULU: [laughs]

ELI: So Alexandra was born on November 6, 1988. She was born in Almaty, 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 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.

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

ELI: Well [laughs] 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.

LATIF: Right.

ELI: But what we know for sure, 2011, Aaron Swartz 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.

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

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

LULU: It's like a forfeit?

ELI: It's kind of like a forfeit. So the judge awards the publishers $15-million in damages.

LULU: Oh!

LATIF: [gasps]

LULU: Oh my gosh!

ELI: $15-million US dollars.

LATIF: Wow! That she clearly does not have.

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

LULU: Is she being actively protected? Like, is Interpol, like, trying to find her?

ELI: So the FBI definitely thinks she's being protected by the Russians.

LATIF: Okay.

ELI: 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.

LATIF: Huh.

ELI: And it is still in no way clear where in the world exactly she is.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: Oh, it's all so mysterious. Yeah.

ELI: But she is online—very online.

LATIF: [laughs]

ELI: 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.

LATIF: Wow!

LULU: Whoa!

ELI: 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."

LATIF: Wow! Nothing personal.

LULU: She's calling you stupid?

ELI: Yeah. I don't know. She—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 ...

[email chime]

ELI: ... really out of nowhere, I got a message from her. "If you want to record, I will be back in Kazakhstan and we can meet there."

LATIF: Whoa!

LULU: Eli!

ELI: "Next weekend."

LATIF: Oh, wow!

LULU: Whoa!

ELI: 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?

LATIF: Wow! So what are you gonna do?

LULU: Yeah.

ELI: 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.

LULU: And we will find out what happens when Eli lands.

LATIF: That's after the break. Stick around.

LATIF: [singing] Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?

LULU: Lulu.

LATIF: Latif.

LULU: Radiolab.

LATIF: That was my favorite show.

LULU: It was so good! Loved her hat.

LATIF: Anyway, back to this story.

LULU: 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.

LATIF: Alexandra Elbakyan. She usually lives in hiding, but she's just dared Eli to come see her face to face in Kazakhstan.

ELI: A few days later I was traveling from San Francisco to Kazakhstan. So I left on a Wednesday afternoon, got in Friday morning. Sleep straight through a third day because I'm so jetlagged. Wake up Saturday morning and we've got the interview.

ELI: Hello. One two three, one two three. All righty, here I am in front of the Best Western Plus. I am 12 minutes away from meeting Alexandra Elbakyan. Oh, man!

ELI: 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.

ELI: I told her I'm out by the big archway by the road intersection.

ELI: Now I'm still a little bit terrified that she is not going to show up.

ELI: I wonder has she seen my message?

ELI: And so I'm standing out there just waiting and waiting and waiting.

ELI: Ah, [bleep] Ah!

ELI: 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. [laughs]

LULU: [laughs]

ELI: Hello! So nice to finally meet you!

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: I expected you to be a girl.

ELI: To be what?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: A girl.

ELI: To be a girl?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Yes.

ELI: Oh really?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: So it is very surprising.

ELI: [laughs] Oh, I'm so sorry!

LULU: Oh the whole time? [laughs]

ELI: Right.

LATIF: [laughs]

ELI: And it's so clear, right, that she had done no real, like, looking into me or, like, had—she was just like, "Yeah, whatever."

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: I just said, like, hmm, I don't know how to say in English. An impression, yeah.

ELI: Oh! [laughs]

ELI: Anyhow, we started walking towards her aunt's apartment where we were gonna sit down and talk.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: We are almost here.

ELI: And it was this very basic gray, five-storey, concrete box apartment building.

ELI: Hello!

ELI: And ...

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Which tea do you like? Black one or green one?

ELI: Black?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Black. Black, sure.

ELI: After some tea with her mom and her aunt, we sat down in their living room surrounded by family photos to do the interview.

ELI: How are you feeling? Are you—you feel ready? Good to go?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: It's good. Good.

ELI: 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?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: No.

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

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: No. [laughs]

ELI: [laughs] Why do you think they ...

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

ELI: That's a fair point.

ELI: 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.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Well actually, at first when Sci-Hub started, I just was doing it because it was fun and I felt happy.

ELI: Hmm. Can you say more about that?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: I'm not very good at describing feelings, but because ...

ELI: 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.

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

ELI: Didn't have a lot of friends.

ELI: Hmm.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Yeah. And I found the school boring. Maybe I was depressed or something like that.

ELI: 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.

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

ELI: 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.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: For molecular biology. And ...

ELI: 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."

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: So it was like a paper exchange section.

ELI: 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 kind of just starts doing it just as sort of a casual activity.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Something like a game, but also ...

ELI: Pretty quickly ...

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: ... like, for me it became some kind of a social activity. It was a way to connect to people because, you know, certain academic paper causes a lot of emotion in another person.

ELI: Hmm.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: They are extremely happy and very excited at receiving that paper. Then they reply, "Thank you very much." And I felt good about it. [laughs]

ELI: She actually wrote about this moment in her autobiography. She says, "For the first time 'Thank you' was said to me."

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: Whoa. Whoa.

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

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Yeah, so adjust monitor. New request appears. And then you quickly solve it.

ELI: But the faster she got at this it seemed ...

DIRECT MESSAGE: I'm looking for ...

DIRECT MESSAGE: I'm looking for cortisol research.

DIRECT MESSAGE: Urgent! I need ...

ELI: ... the more requests there were pouring in. Until eventually she kind of gets to 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 ...

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: It was more clever to have sub-program that you can ...

ELI: ... 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.

ELI: Are they expensive?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: It depends on the university. Some—some cost for example, like $7 or $12 US.

ELI: 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.

ELI: And did it work?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: To my surprise, yes, it did work.

ELI: Boom! Sci-Hub is born.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: And immediately became—how to say—popular.

[NEWS CLIP: The website Sci-Hub ...]

[NEWS CLIP: Sci-Hub ...]

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: So just basic was like maybe couple of thousand requests per day from Russia. But after that ...

[NEWS CLIP: Sci-Hub.io ...]

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: ... the website spread to other forums.

ELI: And requests started coming in from all over the world.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Italy, Sweden, Chinese.

ELI: India.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Iranian.

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

ELI: Is there a voice in the back of your mind that thinks, like, this is a little bit risky? Like, this could be dangerous?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: No.

ELI: No?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: No. Why?

ELI: I mean, but you knew what had happened to, for instance, like, Aaron Swartz.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Yes, of course. But I remember I didn't pay a lot of attention.

ELI: You didn't—you just didn't think that that could happen to you?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: No. Yeah, maybe I was a little bit naïve, but I thought that Sci-Hub is going to overthrow academic publishing and the corporate system. Yes. [laughs]

ELI: 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.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: No. [laughs]

ELI: Why not? Wouldn't that make the threat go away?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Perhaps, but Sci-Hub at that point it was necessary.

ELI: 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.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: For example, in Iran they are under sanctions, so they couldn't legally buy the subscriptions.

ELI: 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.

LATIF: Including potentially shutting the site down.

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

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: So I sent a letter to the judge where I explained the reasons why I started Sci-Hub website, that copyright is a law that works against science, that all people should have the right to knowledge and that hence I would not participate in this case.

LATIF: She chose being a wanted woman?

ELI: 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 file 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.

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

ELI: 25.

LULU: 20—yeah. So you're a kid too. Okay.

ELI: He stands up. He basically says, "I will be representing Miss Elbakyan in the case against Sci-Hub." And nobody knows who he is.

NILESH JAIN: [laughs] So my official name is Nilesh Ashok Kumar Jain, but I go by Neil.

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

NILESH JAIN: I'm a rogue lawyer. [laughs]

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

NILESH JAIN: Yeah. So I grew up in a very small—I mean, it's not even a town, it's a village near Jaipur, Rajasthan.

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

NILESH JAIN: And I wanted to get out of that, all of it. I just wanted to go to Delhi.

ELI: So he got to Delhi, got a job. And he wanted to study law ...

NILESH JAIN: 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 school from Sci-Hub.

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

LULU: Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

NILESH JAIN: I contacted her via messenger, the Twitter messenger. And I asked her, "Do you have any lawyer in Delhi?"

ELI: Had lawyers ever reached out before?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: No. [laughs]

ELI: Gotcha. Gotcha.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: It was the first time.

ELI: But Nilesh offers to represent her by himself for free.

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

ELI: 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 ...

NILESH JAIN: Indian laws are a bit liberal.

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

[NEWS CLIP: A Delhi University photocopy case.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's intellectual property.]

ELI: 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 a hundred percent legal due to an "educational exception."

LULU: Hmm.

ELI: And so Nilesh basically said to her that you might just have a chance here.

ELI: So ...

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: If it was a very small country, perhaps I would just—didn't pay attention to it.

ELI: But you knew that you had a lot of users in India.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Yes.

ELI: About how many?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Hmm. It was about 800,000 in a month, something like that.

ELI: Wow.

NILESH JAIN: If we get a relief in our favor, this will be huge. Huge relief all over the world, not just India.

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

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: I don't know, I wanted Sci-Hub to be accepted as a legal solution, you know, in countries of the world.

ELI: And the only way you're gonna do that is if you win somewhere.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Yes. Mm-hmm. We have to start winning.

ELI: So just two days after he first talked to Alexandra, Nilesh shows up at this hearing. Nobody knows who he is, which 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 gonna be a big case. And for this random guy who nobody has ever heard of to show up ...

NILESH JAIN: I'm representing Alexandra Elbakyan.

ELI: ... really stunned everybody.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: court proceedings]

ELI: So the first hearing was on December 24, 2020. And as soon as we heard about the case we hired this reporter in India Karishma Mehrotra ...

KARISHMA MEHROTRA: Nilesh!

ELI: ... to check in with Nilesh as the case proceeded.

KARISHMA MEHROTRA: How's your morning?

NILESH JAIN: It's fine.

ELI: Because 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.

KARISHMA MEHROTRA: Then it'll get done, but if after 2:00 then it won't get done?

NILESH JAIN: Yeah. It got deferred, adjourned again, again, again, 'til ...

KARISHMA MEHROTRA: Oh my God.

ELI: Now it just seems to be sort of stuck in this bureaucratic hole.

NILESH JAIN: This is what happens in Indian judicial system, cases in India go on for years and years before the final judgment and all.

LATIF: But that means she could still win eventually, right?

ELI: 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.

NILESH JAIN: This is an understanding that Sci-Hub won't upload new articles until they decide the case.

ELI: While the case is going on, Sci-Hub can't add any new scientific papers to their database. And it's been over two years now.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Hmm.

ELI: Do you worry that waiting so long could maybe have a bad effect on Sci-Hub because people would no longer think that it has the latest research?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Well, it depends. Perhaps Sci-Hub is going to remain as a kind of a museum. [laughs] And—yes?

ELI: Wait, sorry. As a museum? What do you mean by that?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: I mean that it should contain ...

ELI: 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.

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

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

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Well, perhaps. [laughs]

ELI: [laughs] I'm starting to learn a little bit more what you mean when you say "perhaps."

LATIF: But I still use it. Millions of people still use it all over the world all the time.

ELI: Well ...

LATIF: If Sci-Hub disappears, that will be an immense loss.

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

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Today more than 50 percent of new academic papers are already published in open access.

ELI: So in the past few years, all of the big publishers, they have come out in support of open access.

LULU: Huh!

LATIF: Huh!

ELI: Without—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, you know, universities pay for the cost of publishing.

JEFF MACKIE-MASON: 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.

ELI: This is once again UC-Berkeley's Jeff MacKie-Mason.

JEFF MACKIE-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.

ELI: So I could—I could in theory go read a UC-authored article at this point? Okay. I see.

JEFF MACKIE-MASON: 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.

ELI: At the same time, the US government has also decided to put its weight behind open access.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: All right. Welcome everybody. Thank you for joining us for this virtual community forum update on ...]

ELI: August 25, 2022, the Biden administration announced their new policy on federally-funded research.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, spokesperson: 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 and the other important products ...]

ELI: And 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.

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

LULU: Hmm.

ELI: Maybe, yeah. But—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?

ELI: What is your end game here? What do you do next?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Next? Well, I also have many other ideas I've thought about apart from Sci-Hub.

ELI: Could you tell me some of those?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Well for example, I was thinking about, like, creating my own research institute where—where we are going to study immortality problems.

ELI: Oh, wow.

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

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: I've always been studying somewhere in parallel to Sci-Hub.

ELI: Hmm.

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Mm-hmm.

ELI: Especially in neuroscience. I actually remember in her autobiography, she has a whole section about this concept of hers called the global brain.

LULU: Hmm. Meaning?

ELI: She explains it kind of like an internet, but instead of just the seamless sharing of information there's 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.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: Hmm.

ELI: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she—she admits openly that this is a very ambitious idea, and the technical details are somewhat ...

LULU: Like how you plug in?

ELI: Yeah. Regardless—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.

LULU: Yeah.

ELI: Does it upset you, everything you've had to give up to make this website?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: [laughs] Maybe it limited my life in some respect.

ELI: 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?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: Those are kind of things that are hard to explain.

ELI: Would you mind trying for me?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: As I said, those are kinds of things that are hard to explain.

ELI: Well, I'm just—I'm just trying to understand what exactly those limitations are. For example, what would happen if you came to America today?

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: That would be not the best option.

ELI: Are there any countries that you—other countries maybe that you've wanted to go to but you have to ...

ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN: 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.

LATIF: Thank you, Eli.

ELI: Yeah, no problem.

LATIF: This story was reported by Eli Cohen with Karishma Mehrotra.

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

LATIF: It was mixed by Jeremy Bloom.

LULU: And it was edited by international woman of mystery Alex Neason.

LATIF: Who personally owes me millions of dollars. Special thanks to Vrindra Bhandari, Balázs Bodó, Stephen Buranyi, Ian Graber-Stiehl, Joel Joseph, Noorain Khalifa, Steve McLaughlin, Aparajita Lath, Marcia McNutt, Randy Scheckman and Tanmay Singh. This is Radiolab, which will continue to be free for everyone around the world.

LULU: I'm Lulu Miller.

LATIF: I'm Latif Nasser.

LULU: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: 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, Rachael Cusick, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Qari, Anna Rascouët-Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Andrew Viñales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Kreiger and Natalie Middleton.]

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