russian website for free research papers

Science’s pirate queen

Alexandra elbakyan is plundering the academic publishing establishment.

By Ian Graber-Stiehl

Illustrations by Alex Castro

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In cramped quarters at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world. It was the reason that, one day in June 2015, Alexandra Elbakyan, the student and programmer with a futurist streak and a love for neuroscience blogs, opened her email to a message from the world’s largest publisher: “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED.”

It wasn’t long before an administrator at Library Genesis, another pirate repository named in the lawsuit, emailed her about the announcement. “I remember when the administrator at LibGen sent me this news and said something like ‘Well, that’s... that’s a real problem.’ There’s no literal translation,” Elbakyan tells me in Russian. “It’s basically ‘That’s an ass.’ But it doesn’t translate perfectly into English. It’s more like ‘That’s fucked up. We’re fucked.’”

Sci-Hub posed a direct threat to the academic publishers’ business model

The publisher Elsevier owns over 2,500 journals covering every conceivable facet of scientific inquiry to its name, and it wasn’t happy about either of the sites. Elsevier charges readers an average of $31.50 per paper for access; Sci-Hub and LibGen offered them for free. But even after receiving the “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED” email, Elbakyan was surprisingly relaxed. She went back to work. She was in Kazakhstan. The lawsuit was in America. She had more pressing matters to attend to, like filing assignments for her religious studies program; writing acerbic blog-style posts on the Russian clone of Facebook, called vKontakte; participating in various feminist groups online; and attempting to launch a sciencey-print T-shirt business.  

That 2015 lawsuit would, however, place a spotlight on Elbakyan and her homegrown operation. The publicity made Sci-Hub bigger, transforming it into the largest Open Access academic resource in the world. In just six years of existence, Sci-Hub had become a juggernaut: the 64.5 million papers it hosted represented two-thirds of all published research, and it was available to anyone.

But as Sci-Hub grew in popularity, academic publishers grew alarmed. Sci-Hub posed a direct threat to their business model. They began to pursue pirates aggressively, putting pressure on internet service providers (ISPs) to combat piracy. They had also taken to battling advocates of Open Access, a movement that advocates for free, universal access to research papers.

Sci-Hub provided press, academics, activists, and even publishers with an excuse to talk about who owns academic research online. But that conversation — at least in English — took place largely without Elbakyan, the person who started Sci-Hub in the first place. Headlines reduced her to a female Aaron Swartz, ignoring the significant differences between the two. Now, even though Elbakyan stands at the center of an argument about how copyright is enforced on the internet, most people have no idea who she is.

“The first time I encountered the distribution of scientific articles and sharing, it was in 2009,” Elbakyan says. As a student doing research at the Russian Academy of Sciences, she ran across an obstacle encountered by students the world over: paywalls. Most science journals charge money to access their articles. And the prices have only been rising.

How much? Exact estimates are hard to come by. Research by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) suggests that the cost of libraries’ subscriptions to journals only increased by 9 percent between 1990 and 2013. But as Library Journal ’s annual survey pointed out, there was a change in ARL’s data collection. That estimate, Library Journal said, “flies in the face of reality.” Library Journal ’s records showed that a year’s subscription to a chemistry journal in the US ran, on average, for $4,773; the cheapest subscriptions were to general science journals, which only cost $1,556 per year. Those prices make these journals inaccessible to most people without institutional access — and they’re increasingly difficult for institutions to finance as well. “Those who [have] been involved with purchasing serials in the last 20 years know that serial prices represent the largest inflationary factor for library budgets,” the Library Journal report says.

Over half of all research is now published by the big five of academic publishing

Taken together, universities’ subscriptions to academic journals often cost $500,000 to $2 million. Even Harvard said in 2012 that it couldn’t afford journals’ rising fees, citing, in particular, two publishers that had inflated their rates by 145 percent within six years. Germany’s University of Konstanz dropped its subscription to Elsevier’s journals in 2014, saying its prices had increased by 30 percent in five years.

The prices rise because a few top players have positioned themselves with the power to ratchet them up with impunity. Over half of all research, according to one study , is now published by the big five of academic publishing: Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and, depending on the metric, either the American Chemical Society or Sage Publishing. That’s a significant change from 1973, when only 20 percent of these kinds of papers were published by the big five. And that’s just for natural and medical science papers; the social sciences have it worse. In 1973, only one in 10 articles debuted in the big five’s pages; now it’s more than half. For some fields, such as psychology, 71 percent of all papers now go through these players.

Profits and market caps for the publishers have also swelled. Elsevier’s parent comapny RELX Group, for example, boasts a nearly $35 billion market cap. It has reported a nearly 39 percent profit margin for its scientific publishing arm — which dwarfs, by comparison, the margins of tech titans such as Apple , Google , and Ama zon .

If you’re looking to access an article behind a paywall, the only way to get it legally is to pay, says Peter Suber , director of Harvard’s Open Access Project. But there is a gray area: you can ask an author for a copy. (Most academics will oblige.) Aside from either that or finding articles published in free Open Access journals, the next best option is to find pre-publication copies of papers that authors have put in open-access repositories like Cornell’s Arxiv.org .

Suber is one of the loudest voices for Open Access movement. He was one of the original architects of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative statement that established the most widely used definition of Open Access: “free availability on the public internet,” with the only constraint on sharing of research being authors’ “control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” It also established the movement’s mandate to make Open Access the default method of publishing within a decade.

When Elbakyan found herself facing paywall after paywall, she began to wonder why she shouldn’t just jump them

That hasn’t happened yet, but the movement has inspired people to create thousands of Open Access journals including PLOS (the Public Library of Sciences). The movement has also pushed many publishers to allow scientists to upload their research to Open Access repositories like Arxiv.org — which are currently the largest legal source of Open Access papers. The movement has been so successful that even the government has shown signs of supporting it. For instance, in 2013, the Obama administration mandated that copies of research conducted through federal agencies must be uploaded to free repositories within 12 months of publishing.

Many students like Elbakyan simply email studies’ authors, or tweet the article’s information with the hashtag #ICanHazPDF hoping someone will send them a copy if they’re blocked by a paywall. But these methods, like scouring Arxiv, tend to be hit-or-miss. So when Elbakyan found herself facing paywall after paywall, she began to wonder why she shouldn’t just jump them.

Elbakyan had been following the Open Access movement and was an ardent fan of MIT’s OpenCourseWare — an initiative through which the university makes virtually all of its coursework available — since 2008. She’d also always been fascinated with neuroscience, especially the articles by the neurologist-turned-writer (and longtime head of The Guardian’s Neurophilosophy blog) Mo Costandi. Elbakyan became convinced that untapped potential was hidden in the human brain. She particularly liked the idea of the “global brain,” a neuroscience-inspired idea by futurists that an intelligent network could facilitate information storage and transfer — driving communication between people in real time, the way that neurons that fire together wire together.

“I started thinking about the idea of a brain-machine interface that can connect minds in the same way computer network does,” Elbakyan says. If a human’s mind could be connected to a bird’s, she wondered, could we truly experience what it felt like soar?

At first, these were just philosophical musings. However, Elbakyan was compelled by how neural interfaces could enable people to share information, even across language barriers, with unprecedented speed. “Later, I expanded the idea to include not only hard interfaces that would connect people directly neuron-by-neuron, but also soft interfaces, such as speech, that we use every day to communicate.” She cared less about the form than the function: she wanted a global brain. To her, paywalls began to seem like the plaques in an Alzheimer’s-riddled mind, clogging up the flow of information.

Her inspirations also took a slightly more nationalistic bent. Elbakyan studied the writings of Russian neurofuturist thinkers like Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky. In 2011, she attempted to create a Russian-language PLOS-style Open Access journal. (She failed to find enough scientists who were interested.) Later that year, Elbakyan even applied to the Skolkovo Innovation Center, Russia’s self-styled answer to Silicon Valley.

Political theory provided new growth to her evolving Open Access philosophy. Communism, a model of government-less society in which resources and opportunity are metered out with equality and impartiality, has never been successfully implemented. Nevertheless, it was a particularly seductive concept to Elbakyan. The collective ideals of communism entwined for her with the ideals of the scientific method. After all, science depends on shared data. History’s greatest scientific discoveries have all been made and shared, as scientists often say, from atop the shoulders of giants: their scientific predecessors who shared their research. To Elbakyan, science thrives only when scientists shout their discoveries to everyone.

According to Elbakyan, communism and science share a common mission, which she refers to as “scientific communism.” It’s a concept she came to borrow from the 20th century American sociologist Robert Merton, who founded the sociology of science, a study of science as a social practice. (Merton coined influential terms such as “self-fulfilling prophecy,” “role model,” and “unintended consequences.”) Most influential to Elbakyan were Merton’s “ norms ,” which were what he considered to be the defining characteristics of science: universalism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism, and, of course, communism. (Throughout our interview, she’s still quick to rattle off quotes from Merton, declaring, “The communism of the scientific ethos is incompatible with the definition of technology as ‘private property’ in a capitalistic economy.”)

According to Elbakyan, communism and science share a common mission

Elbakyan’s scientific communism mirrors the Western association between democracy and information openness. (Take the commonly used American expression “the democratization of… ”) Her intellectual convictions informed the growing vehemence with which Elbakyan insisted that absolutely unfettered access was the only acceptable level of access the public should have to discoveries. Ultimately, she concluded that in an age where scientists can publish their research “directly on the internet,” or through paywall-free Open Access journals, traditional publishers will inevitably fade into obsolescence.

To Open Access activists like Elbakyan and Suber, since most research is publicly funded, paywall journals have essentially made most science a twice-paid product, bought first by taxpayers and secondly by scientists.

On the whole, scientific publishing has become a market increasingly characterized by consolidation, soaring subscription fees, and rising profit margins. As a result, plenty of scientists, students, and journalists alike have come to see an empire of academic piracy as a necessity, raising the question: what value do publishers add to any given paper?

Richard Van Noorden probed this very question in a 2013 article in Nature that looked at the meteoric rise of Open Access journals. These journals had an unassuming start in the late 1980s and ‘90s with a handful of obscure digital publications. Many of these were the result of scientists, entrepreneurs, and editors from paywall publications who were inspired by the Open Access movement and struck out to start their own publications. Within just a few decades, these journals have come to account for 28 percent of all published research that’s ever been issued a Digital Object Identifier — essentially a type of URL for research. As the article pointed out, many Open Access publishers charge scientists fees — often anywhere from a few hundred dollars up to around two thousand — for processing their articles, whether they’re accepted or not.

Standard publishers, by contrast, generally charge much less if they require processing fees at all. In return, they find peer reviewers, check for plagiarism, edit, typeset, commonly add graphics, convert files into standard formats such as XML, and add metadata. They distribute print and digital copies of research. Their press departments, especially for more prestigious journals, are well-oiled machines. They churn out perspicuous press releases and help journalists get in touch with experts, enforcing embargo periods where media outlets can review research and formulate their coverage before it goes live — which creates incentives for publications like The Verge to cover more of their studies.

Many publishers also do original journalism and commentary, thanks to the work of large, costly full-time staffs of editors, graphic designers, and technical experts. “But not every publisher ticks all the boxes on this list, puts in the same effort or hires costly professional staff,” wrote Van Noorden in the Nature article. “For example, most of PLoS ONE’s editors are working scientists, and the journal does not perform functions such as copy-editing.” Publishing powerhouses like Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have estimated its internal cost per-article to be around $3,700. Nature , meanwhile, says that each article sets it back around $30,000 to $40,000 — an unreasonable amount to expect scientists to pay if they were to go Open Access.

Charging a fee isn’t the only business model for Open Access journals, Suber says: 70 percent of peer-review Open Access models don’t do it. Moreover, thanks in large part to pressure by Open Access activists like Suber, many journals allow scientists to deposit a copy of their work in repositories like Arxiv. Elbakyan, on the other hand, wants Open Access fees covered up front in research grants.

Elbakyan argues Sci-Hub is a tool of necessity, and its massive usership in poor countries seems to strengthen her case

This question of what value publishers add was front and center in coverage on Elsevier and Elbakyan’s case. The New York Times asked , “Should All Research Papers Be Free?” When Science Magazine worked with Elbakyan to map Sci-Hub’s user statistics, it discovered that a quarter of Sci-Hub downloads were from the 34 richest countries on Earth. Elbakyan argues Sci-Hub is a tool of necessity, and its massive usership in poor countries seems to strengthen her case. But the 25 percent of users from wealthy countries suggests Sci-Hub is a tool of convenience, says James Milne, a spokesman for the Coalition for Responsible Sharing , a consortium that represents the interests of big publishers. (When I contacted Elsevier for comment on this story, I was referred to Milne.) The CRS was originally formed by a coterie of five publishing giants — Elsevier, ACS, Brill, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer —  to pressure scientist social networking site Researchgate into taking down 7 million unauthorized copies of their papers.

Before Elbakyan was a pirate, she was an aspiring scientist with a knack for philosophizing and computer programming. “I started programming before even being in school,” Elbakyan says. Once enrolled, she developed a program that would ultimately serve as a precursor for Sci-Hub: a script that circumvented paywalls, using MIT’s subscription programs to download neuroscience books. “It wasn’t working exactly the same as Sci-Hub, but it was delivering the same result: going around paywalls and downloading those books.” She often shared these books with other users on a Russian biology forum she frequented, molbiol.ru, which would prove to lay the groundwork for Sci-Hub’s debut.

“Sci-Hub started as an automation for what I was already doing manually,” Elbakyan says. It grew organically from her desire to let people download papers “at the click of a button.” Users loved it. Sci-Hub’s use proliferated across the forum immediately — though it took longer for it to outgrow the forum.

Russia’s weak intellectual property protection had long made it one of the largest piracy hubs among major economies. This was an advantage for Elbakyan in creating Sci-Hub, but she soon found herself watching Russia and Kazakhstan’s dialogue on piracy shift. For years, the focus had been entertainment, but now it was rapidly pivoting toward academic piracy. New anti-piracy laws, which targeted what Elbakyan saw as essential information sharing, hit home for her: in Kazakhstan, illicit file-sharing had just become punishable by up to five years in prison. She felt that the only responsible choice was to join the fray herself.

When Elbakyan started Sci-Hub in 2011, “it was a side project,” she says. She operated it without a repository for downloaded articles. With every request for a paper, a new copy was downloaded through a university’s subscription. It would automatically be deleted six hours later. If, for some reason, a person couldn’t access a paper through one university’s servers, they could switch and download them through another’s.

In 2012, she struck a partnership with LibGen, which had only archived books until then. LibGen asked Elbakyan to upload the articles Sci-Hub was downloading. Then, in 2013, when Sci-Hub’s popularity began to explode in China, she started using LibGen as an offsite repository. Instead of downloading and deleting new copies of papers or buying expensive hard drives, she retooled Sci-Hub to check if LibGen had a copy of a user’s requested paper first. If so, she pulled it from its archive.

That worked well until the domain LibGen.org, went down, deleting 40,000 papers Elbakyan had collected, probably because one of its administrators died of cancer. “One of my friends suggested to start actively collecting donations on Sci-Hub,” she says. “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. Around 1 million of these papers [were] uploaded from Sci-Hub. The other[s], as I was told, came from databases that were downloaded on the darknet.” From then on, LibGen’s database would simply be her backup.

Elbakyan is reluctant to disclose much about how she secured access to so many papers, but she tells me that most of it came from exploiting libraries and universities’ subscriptions, saying that she “gained access” to “around 400 universities.”

It’s likely that many of the credentials Elbakyan secured came from leaked login information and lapses in universities’ security. One official at Marquette University, alleges to have seen evidence of Sci-Hub phishing for credentials. Elbakyan vociferously denies this and has previously said that many academics have even offered their login information. That could explain how Sci-Hub downloads some papers “directly from publishers,” as she has previously claimed .

It wasn’t until 2013 that Elbakyan faced her first major obstacle. That was when Elsevier sent a notice to PayPal, where she’d collected donations. At the time, according to testimony the publisher later gave in its lawsuit, Elsevier was aware that Sci-Hub had paid some students for access to their university credentials. And several PayPal payments had been sent to Elbakyan for buying a proxy server that would allow Sci-Hub to authenticate itself as a student. After the publisher’s notice, PayPal deactivated her account.

When Elsevier’s first shot across Elbakyan’s bow splashed down, the publisher already had gotten serious about pressuring internet service providers and payment services to enforce privacy. But it wasn’t the first time the publisher had pulled these strong-arm tactics. In fact, Elsevier was leading the way among academic publishers.

In 2008, Elsevier shut down an international piracy operation wherein a Vietnamese entrepreneur was selling digital copies of journals to academics. The publisher, both on its own, and through at least one industry group, the American Association of Publishers, pushed Congress for laws that that would have made it easier for publishers to more easily coerce ISPs, search engines, and DNS services to block access to a site — or force advertisers and payment services to drop their support for copyright violators.

Elsevier was leading the way among publishers with its strong-arm tactics

From publishers’ perspective, it only made sense. Increasing their own power to enforce copyright claims was protecting their intellectual property. And though the bills sparked intense backlash for many companies that supported them, individual academic publishers like Elsevier were overlooked.

That same year, the AAP and Elsevier also supported and lobbied in favor of a bill that would have prevented the government from requiring agencies to make research published through a journal Open Access at any point. That would have effectively killed the NIH ’s 2005 mandate that all research funded by the agency have a copy submitted to an Open Access repository within 12 months.

Later that year, the publisher’s rising prices and support for restrictive legislation galvanized nearly 17,000 scientists to pledge against publishing in its journals. Facing backlash, Elsevier reversed its position. Despite its meteoric rise, the boycott ultimately faded with little concrete effect on the publishing giant.

Elsevier’s efforts weren’t limited to lobbying for more-restrictive laws, either. Months before targeting Elbakyan, Elsevier helped 17 other publishers shut down the pirate academic repository Library.nu. Between 2012 and 2013, Elsevier and the AAP also opposed and lobbied against three bills — the Federal Research Public Access Act , Public Access to Public Science Act , and Fair Access to Science and Technology Research — all of which proposed making it mandatory that copies of papers from federally funded research be deposited in an Open Access repository after some period.

In 2015, Elsevier sued the piracy site AvaxHome for $37.5 million. Then, the UK-based Publishing Association , of which Elsevier was a member, and the AAP, where Elsevier was joined by closely associated publisher, the American Chemical Society ( ACS ), also successfully filed an injunction against a slew of ebook pirates — including AvaxHome, LibGen, Ebookee, Freebookspot, Freshwap, Bookfi, and Bookre — mandating that ISPs block customers’ access to them. Later, it also attempted to force Cloudflare, an internet security service, to turn over logs that would identify the operators of LibGen and Bookfi.

Elsevier hadn’t gotten the laws it wanted, ones that would have allowed it to pressure ISPs, payment services, and other internet intermediaries to block sites accused of piracy. So instead, it steadily set court precedents that did the same thing.

Elsevier doesn’t oppose Open Access, says the Coalition for Responsible Sharing’s Milne. “I can say with confidence that all the members of the Coalition (Elsevier included) embrace open access,” Milne says. (He refused to answer any line of questioning that focused too heavily on any one publisher’s actions.) Every one of the members of the coalition has their own Open Access journals. And they all also allow scientists to upload a copy of preprint, non-peer-reviewed papers to Open Access archives.

The publishers’ sales teams have heard “individual institutions and consortiums” name-drop Researchgate and pirate sites like Sci-Hub to get leverage in price negotiations

The actions of the publishers in the coalition have simply shown an opposition to illegal and unauthorized sharing, Milne says. Before Elsevier and ACS sued Researchgate, they tried for two years to convince the site to adopt their “ Voluntary Principles on Article Sharing, ” which would allow scientists to share articles — though only between others in their research groups, and provided that articles’ metadata wasn’t changed, preventing publishers from collecting accurate data on articles’ sharing statistics. Before suing Sci-Hub, Elsevier attempted to stop Elbakyan technically. The publishers feel they’ve been patient in enforcing copyright claims, particularly considering that, as Milne tells me, their sales teams have heard “individual institutions and consortiums,” which he is not at liberty to name, name-drop Researchgate and pirate sites like Sci-Hub to get leverage in price negotiations.

Sci-Hub’s burgeoning reach and reputation painted a target on Elbakyan’s back. Nonetheless, by the time Elsevier took aim, Elbakyan was already a woman on a mission. Sci-Hub was about to become more to Elbakyan than a “side project.”  

“With LibGen, I saw that it is possible to accumulate 10 million scientific articles,” she says. After that, she figured “[why] not download all the scientific articles that are currently listed in cross-reference database?” With PayPal now closed to her, she simply turned to bitcoin donations to keep feeding Sci-Hub’s growth.

Elbakyan had been pursuing a master’s program on public administration (which, she tells me, would’ve allowed her to make the “upgrade” to her living conditions she’d long been jonesing for) at Russia’s National Research University. She’d hoped it would let her influence internet information-sharing legislation. But in 2014, Elbakyan left, disappointed.

She switched to a master’s program in religious studies, where her thesis led her to research how ancient societies treated information distribution. Both the revelations about the ancient societies and their attitudes toward ”information openness,” and the “feeling that [public administration] wasn’t quite the direction that I wanted to go” led her to double down on Sci-Hub.

Elbakyan created several more backup copies of Sci-Hub’s database. She rewrote Sci-Hub’s code, starting from square one, so that the service could download papers automatically. Now, once users pointed Sci-Hub toward an article, the site would check every university proxy server until it found one through which it could download the paper, and would download it automatically. They didn’t have to manually browse the publisher’s website through Sci-Hub to find the articles anymore.

Elbakyan had defied Elsevier. Her former hobby had become her primary focus. Nothing would make her waiver from making Sci-Hub a titan of Open Access.

Until, that is, the Kremlin unintentionally accomplished what Elsevier couldn’t: it got Sci-Hub shut down — at least in Russia. After an isolationist policy enacted by the Kremlin sparked intense bickering between scientists and Elbakyan, she pulled the plug herself.

In May 2015, as part of a sweeping effort to insulate Russia from foreign influence, the Kremlin labeled Russia’s only private funder and popularizer of scientific research, the Dynasty Foundation, a “foreign agent.” Unlike much of the scientific community, Elbakyan was happy about change. However, her reaction would spark what she saw as cyberbullying from her opponents, prompting her to shut down Sci-Hub in Russia.

Elbakyan’s reaction to what she saw as cyberbullying would prompt her to shut down Sci-Hub in Russia

About three years before the Dynasty incident, the Kremlin adopted a law that required any organization with foreign funding not strictly involved with “science, culture, art, healthcare, charity,” and a laundry list of other activities, to register as a “foreign agent.” This barred those organizations from any further political activity, and raised a red flag for any associated groups. Charities, NGOs, and many social scientists decried the law, refusing to register. They argued that “political activity” was vaguely described, and that the law would cripple vital international collaboration. So, in 2014, the Kremlin amended the law so organizations could be labeled involuntarily. By July of last year, 88 organizations had become “ foreign agents,” and the law had sparked protests from human rights groups calling it a crackdown on freedom of expression and LGBTQ rights.

Dynasty was founded in 2002 by Dmitry Zimin, a beloved philanthropic oligarch whose work had even won him an award from the government “for the Protection of the Russian Science” just weeks earlier. By American standards, Dynasty wasn’t that deep-pocketed. In 2015, its anticipated budget for research funding amounted to just $7.6 million USD. And yet, in Russia, it had no peer as a private supporter of science.

However, Dynasty had always been heavily involved in education: funding research, supporting high school science programs, and training science teachers, among other things. In order to continue the same line of work, the fund would now somehow have to tiptoe through its involvement in the education system without doing anything that the Kremlin could construe as political activity.  

Through Dynasty, Zimin supported another one of his organizations, the Liberal Mission Foundation (LMF). It was effectively a think tank that assisted education initiatives that taught modern political science from a liberal perspective in Russian schools — including Elbakyan’s. This is ostensibly what qualified as “political activity.” And though Zimin was a Russian national, he kept the money with which he supported Dynasty in foreign banks — making it fair game to be considered foreign funding. (In an interview with The New Yorker, Zimin said, “The Russian government also keeps its money abroad,” likely referencing the fact that the Kremlin holds billions in US bonds.) Together, Zimin’s “foreign” money and Dynasty’s relation to the LMF provided the excuse for the “foreign agent” label.

Zimin was likely interesting for other reasons, though. Not only did he attend 2012 anti-Putin protests in Moscow, he also supported a free press. In 2014, when Zimin’s cable company, Beeline , was forced by the government to drop Dozhd , the country’s only major liberal, independent TV news station, Zimin said, “I think that everyone understands that this is not Beeline’s decision.” Afterward, he went on to bankroll a number of independent news outlets .

The government never cited these incidents as part of its reason for labeling Dynasty and the LMF as “foreign agents,” though Zimin’s past ventures do raise some suspicion about the Kremlin’s motives. Nevertheless, Zimin decided to shutter Dynasty, to get the LMF taken off the “foreign agent” list.

Elbakyan contends that Dynasty is somehow Sci-Hub’s capitalistic foil

Many scientists protested, but Elbakyan didn’t understand the outrage. As far as she was concerned, Dynasty — particularly through its funding of the LMF — had spread “propaganda against Putin and the Russian authorities.” She describes Zimin’s work through Dynasty, and the organization itself, as “anti-communist,” though she’s vague about how. Elbakyan says the foundation and Sci-Hub are “ideologically opposed,” and contends that Dynasty is somehow Sci-Hub’s capitalistic foil.

“I knew about this fund firsthand. It was involved in the Higher School of Economics where I was studying,” Elbakyan says. So, she began writing posts presenting instances of Dynasty supporting liberal-leaning groups. She asserts that she didn’t want to “[argue] any kind of side.” But the posts read with surprising acrimony for someone ostensibly attempting to be objective. She dubbed Dynasty’s supporters “the Brigades of the ‘Dynasty.’” She also re-shared negative articles about Dynasty that were written by state-controlled media outlets, and even shared Photoshopped pictures doctored to cast Zimin in a blatantly suspicious light.

Shortly afterward, something strange happened. Former members of Sci-Hub’s vKontakte group began saying that Elbakyan, a champion of Open Access to information, had blocked them.

“They just started launching just really personal and low bar attacks on me personally, calling me names, spreading false information about me, calling me crazy, etc.” So she threw them out.

Many of the former members of Sci-Hub’s vKontakte group say that they simply got booted for supporting Dynasty. One scientist, Dmitry Perekalin of Nesmeyanov Institute, said that Elbakyan asked her group to vote on which was better for Russian science, Sci-Hub or Dynasty. “I wrote that it was a false dilemma and was immediately banned,” Perekalin said in a vKontakte post . Ultimately, Elbakyan shut down Sci-Hub in Russia for several days (though many people could still access it through Virtual Private Networks ).

Shortly after the Dynasty controversy at home, Elbakyan discovered that Elsevier was suing her and LibGen abroad.

“I did not believe that it’s possible to win against such a well-funded, rich, and influential company,” says Elbakyan. Rather than fight the case, she’d just keep an eye on it from afar. Money aside, “I would have had to provide certain documents that potentially could have exposed me or my physical location.”

Elsevier’s lawsuit was a civil case, for which extraditing someone to the US from abroad to be tried is generally against the law. Still, Elbakyan worried about being extradited. “I do know about stories where hackers that left Russia or Ukraine for Europe or the United States were unexpectedly arrested.” Although, the main reference she cites is the arrest of Dmitry Zubaka , who had criminal charges against him for a cyberattack against Amazon. Nonetheless, since her last visit in 2010 to speak at Harvard, she’s had no intention of returning to the US.

“I did not believe that it’s possible to win against such a well-funded, rich, and influential company.”

Court transcripts reveal that Elsevier had been playing cat-and-mouse with Elbakyan, working with universities to block her access to the university proxies Sci-Hub used to access their journals. Elsevier’s technicians were able to identify many source IP addresses associated with university computing systems that looked suspicious. They alerted institutions about these breaches, so that the schools could block these proxies’ credentials. However, Elbakyan had penetrated too many universities, and not every school had the technical expertise to keep up.

Elsevier steadily shut down student accounts whose credentials Elbakyan was using to access Elsevier’s database, Science Direct. By doing this, it had “vastly reduced” her access to its articles. On Sci-Hub’s Twitter page, Elbakyan even complained about this, saying that “[due] to the huge amount of accounts that were closed recently we were forced to introduce limits on the maximum number of users, especially foreigners.” She had to prioritize the access of “former USSR countries,” says Elbakyan. “Access from China and Iran was blocked for some time because Sci-Hub couldn’t serve as many requests as were coming from these countries. She also made Sci-Hub inaccessible to Americans (except those using VPNs) — in part because of the number of download requests, but also because she wanted to avoid becoming a target for lawsuits.

Then, Elbakyan switched her strategy. As Elsevier’s technicians testified, instead of using university proxy servers to access Elsevier’s repository directly, Sci-Hub started using them just to obtain an authorization token. Then Sci-Hub could use the token to connect to the repository from a different IP address — no longer leaving an easy breadcrumb trail of the same handful of IP address being consistently used to access and download an outrageous number of papers. By the time the publisher had gone to trial, it still hadn’t figured out any effective workaround to this technique. But, Elsevier had found a different pressure point for enforcing piracy that would establish a precedent for another publisher to get something of a chokehold on Sci-Hub.

Elsevier was awarded $15 million in June. Thanks to an injunction included in the suit, Elbakyan lost the domain Sci-Hub.org as well as Sci-Hub’s Twitter account — but, according to Elbakyan, not before the media coverage boosted Sci-Hub’s usership by a factor of 10.

“I was disappointed in the results of the lawsuit,” she says. “[That] public opinion and the position of modern society did not correspond with the justice’s decision” was a blow. “As far as the amount is concerned,” Elbakyan says that she couldn’t pay $15 million even if she wanted, as she is getting “only few thousand a month” in donations. She may be undercounting. One 2017 PeerJ study estimated that Sci-Hub owned $268,000 in unspent bitcoin as of August 2017. (Though Elbakyan has publicly disagreed with that estimate, she hasn’t said how much she owns in bitcoin. She claims the exact amount is confidential.) Nonetheless, since Elbakyan lives outside the US, she can’t be compelled to pay. “I was actually flattered that my project was evaluated so highly,” she says.

A week later, Elbakyan discovered she was being sued again, this time by the scientific society and publisher ACS. The suit was a long time coming. ACS publications rank among the most-covered by Sci-Hub. To date, Sci-Hub holds copies of 98.8 percent of all of ACS’s research. Until November, when ACS was awarded $4.8 million, she admits that she didn’t follow the case.

But ACS proved more formidable than Elsevier — winning not only the suit, but an injunction demanding that “any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries,” stop doing anything to make Sci-Hub’s operation —  and piracy — possible.

Legal and tech activists like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) immediately decried the injunction. It went too far, the EFF said, setting a precedent eerily similar to previously proposed legislation would’ve worked: ACS theoretically could strong-arm any service that could be seen as aiding Sci-Hub. Forcing internet intermediaries to enforce copyright claims by shutting down accused sites wholesale makes it possible for copyright holders to abuse claims of infringement, says Mitch Stoltz , a senior staff attorney at the EFF. If a website can “disappear on command” without any oversight, there is no incentive to encourage copyright holders to be judicious. Even if a website simply advertises or links to another infringing site, or unintentionally has a few unauthorized reproductions of copyrighted works, not only could a copyright holder black out the site entirely, it would be relatively easy.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a tech nonprofit with members such as Google, Intuit, Uber, and Microsoft, even filed an amicus brief against ACS’s injunction — just as it did when Elsevier, in its case, initially attempted to get a similar injunction — urging the court to drop it.

ACS’s injunction wasn’t the first such web-blocking order — and though ACS said that it wouldn’t pursue ISPs or search engines not in “active participation” with Sci-Hub, the case is one of several that are increasingly making ISPs the pressure points of enforcing copyright. The list of governments that have blocked the site PirateBay by pressuring ISPs into denying access to the site has its own Wikipedia page . The aforementioned AAP and UK Publishers Association case against several ebook pirates also pressured ISPs into blocking access to those sites. Earlier this year, a coalition of Hollywood organizations forced Australian ISPs to block dozens of piracy sites.

Last year in a landmark American case, The Washington Post called “The Copyright Case that Should Worry all Internet Providers,” a court determined that the ISP Cox (a former head of its Abuse Group, even went so far as to say in one email “f the dmca!!!”) had flagrantly disregarded its responsibility to make some effort to enforce piracy. Thus, it didn’t qualify for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s so-called “ safe harbor ” protection, which grants a measure of legal immunity to ISPs that make adequate efforts to curb piracy. Without that protection, Cox lost a lawsuit to the music rights group BMG, which had hired a third-party organization to levy fees from Cox customers found to be accessing accused piracy sites.

After the ACS ruling, a few Sci-Hub domains (.ac, .io, and .cc) stopped working, says Elbakyan. In response, she used Twitter to tell users how to change their settings to get around the blocks. “It’s useful to know how to go around domain blocking,” she says. However, since then, she’s lost Sci-Hub’s. bz domain — announcing on vKontakte that “the capitalists have started blocking Sci-Hub domains, so the site may not be accessible at the regular addresses.”

Sci-Hub isn’t going anywhere. Elbakyan has spare domains. She’s backed up her repository of articles.

“I do not endorse illegal means for providing Open Access,” says Harvard’s Peter Suber. “For most of Sci-Hub’s existence, I went out of my way to dissociate myself from it because it gave Open Access a bad name.” However, Suber says, Sci-Hub isn’t going anywhere. Elbakyan agrees. She has spare domains. She’s backed up her repository of articles. According to her, even if ACS pressures search engines to black out search results, it won’t matter: only 25 percent of Sci-Hub referrals come via search engines anyway.

Sci-Hub is often called the Pirate Bay of science; the Pirate Bay itself was raided twice before it finally succumbed. “If nothing happens to me personally, then naturally I will try to continue Sci-Hub project myself,” Elbakyan says. If something were to happen, while her network of journal and institutional subscriptions might be lost, “the main resource of the project, being the scientific articles, they are already published on the internet.”

Elbakyan faces an uphill battle. ACS has yet to show what it defines as “active participation.” If Sci-Hub’s Twitter page were to get taken down again, it would hobble the word-of-mouth network perpetuating Sci-Hub and ACS’s current domain-name whack-a-mole.

As copyright holders continue establishing even more precedents of compelling ISPs to enforce copyright disputes, other publishers may well follow suit. The Trump administration has expanded ISPs’ ability to surveil customers. Net neutrality, which prevented ISPs from biasing speed, connectivity, and access to some sites over others, has been revoked as well, which means ISPs may get much more discretion in how they enforce piracy. These policy changes place Sci-Hub on a more tenuous footing in the US. But if America’s access were further restricted, it would be a blow to the site, and to many of the “capitalists” that use it.

Despite this, Elbakyan (and Suber) plan to continue with business as usual. Suber will keep pushing for the expansion of Open Access journals and repositories despite publishers’ lobbying. Elbakyan plans to handwave away any more lawsuits and play whatever game of cat-and-mouse she must.

As for the publishers, it seems their attention may be shifting to scientists themselves.

Since 2015, many publishers, including ACS and Elsevier, have pushed their STM voluntary principles for article sharing: a series of rules for researchers and networking sites for scientists on how they can share their research. More recently, at least nine of the largest publishers are actively promoting howcanishareit.com as the go-to reference for scientists looking to learn about publishers’ rules on how they can share their research.

At first glance, these initiatives seem like pushes for increasing the accessibility of research. Upon closer examination, a number of holes in publishers’ advocacy for access become evident: the voluntary principles focus chiefly on giving researchers guidelines on sharing papers only within small collaborative research groups, not the larger public.

Howcanishareit.com offers advice on how scientists can share their research, but buries mention of Open Access journals in links to academic editorials. Similarly, any mention that scientists are allowed to upload preprints to repositories are sequestered in links to individual publishers’ contracts. Several for-profit repositories and Scholarly Collaboration Networks (SCNs) are advertised, but major nonprofit Open Access repositories like PeerJ , Arxiv, and bioRxiv are conspicuously absent. Overall, the site reads like an attempt to “educate” scientists away from more traditional Open Access infrastructure, and, if not to constrain their sharing, then to redirect it toward for-profit platforms.

The legal campaigns against Sci-Hub have made the site more well-known than most repositories, and Elbakyan more famous than legal Open Access champions

Legal Open Access activists like Suber have disagreed with this limited interpretation of Open Access. “The benefits of OA come from sharing with the public, or with everyone who might want to read your research, cite it, apply it, or build on it,” not just SCNs, he says.

These campaigns could erode the base of the Legal Open Access movement: scientists’ awareness of their options for sharing research. Elbakyan, on the other hand, would be left unaffected. The legal campaigns against Sci-Hub have — through the Streisand effect — made the site more well-known than most mainstay repositories, and Elbakyan more famous than legal Open Access champions like Suber. The threat posed by ACS’s injunction against Sci-Hub has increased support for the site from web activists organizations such as the EFF, which considesr the site “a symptom of a serious problem: people who can’t afford expensive journal subscriptions, and who don’t have institutional access to academic databases, are unable to use cutting-edge scientific research.”

The effort may backfire. It does nothing to address disappointment scientists feel about how paywalls hide their work. Meanwhile, Sci-Hub has been making waves that might carry it further to a wider swath of both the public and the scientific community. And though Elbakyan might be sailing in dangerous waters, what’s to stop idealistic scientists who are frustrated with the big publishers from handing over their login credentials to Sci-Hub’s pirate queen?

Correction February 9, 12:45AM ET: This article has been corrected to give James Milne’s actual first name. It has also been updated to note that the Sci-Hub shutdown in Russia was temporary, and to note some traditional publishers have processing fees as well.

Correction February 23 6:40PM ET: This article has been corrected to note that the market cap for RELX Group, not Elsevier, is $35 billion.

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Downloading Articles by Russian Researchers Using the Sci-Hub Resource

V. m. moskovkin.

1 Department of World Economy, Belgorod State National Research University, 308015 Belgorod, Russia

N. N. Gakhova

2 Department of Applied Informatics and Information Technologies, Belgorod State National Research University, 308015 Belgorod, Russia

A. Yu. Nabokov

On the basis of the 28 million downloaded articles posted by J. Bohannon and A. Elbakyan on the Internet on the Sci-Hub resource for the period from September 1, 2015 to February 29, 2016, about 1.5 million articles downloaded by Russian researchers were identified. They were distributed by publishing houses of scientific periodicals, cities, and regions of Russia, from which the download took place. As an example, among the 521 cities in Russia, the largest downloads were observed by researchers from Moscow (731 100 articles), St. Petersburg (132 600), Novosibirsk (57 500), Kazan (55 100), and Tomsk (26 400). Comparisons are made with similar downloads of Ukrainian researchers.

INTRODUCTION

After the Sci-Hub pirate resource was launched in September 2011, all publications about it were more emotional and journalistic in nature. This topic entered the scientific discourse after John Bohannon and Alexandra Elbakyan, founder of Sci-Hub, posted data on 28 million user requests in Sci-Hub for the period from September 1, 2015 to February 29, 2016 in the public domain [ 1 ]. This allowed all interested researchers from around the world to analyze the use of Sci-Hub in their own countries and in specific research areas.

John Bohannon found that this resource is used by scientists not only from developing and underdeveloped countries, where access to subscription journals is difficult, but also from developed countries (a quarter of the requests come from OECD countries), which have good access to subscription journals [ 1 ] and do not want to sacrifice their comfort by obtaining legal access to them in their scientific libraries, which is confirmed by the polls of Jacques Travis [ 2 ]: “17% of the respondents said that accessing the full text through Sci-Hub was easier than through legal channels.” He also found that 37% of the respondents were unable to legally access the articles they needed, and 23% chose Sci-Hub because they disagreed with the pricing of major commercial publishers of scientific periodicals.

All this was best described by Simon Oxenham in summarizing his interview with Alexandra Elbakyan with the catchy headline “Meet the Robin Hood of science” [ 3 ]: “The efficiency of the system is really quite astounding, working far better than the comparatively primitive modes of access given to researchers at top universities, tools that universities must fork out millions of pounds for every year.”

M. Parkill [ 4 ] selected the TOP 100 articles from [ 1 ] into the PlumX tool, and determined that most of them were published in 2015, that is, Sci-Hub users prefer to receive the latest articles. Moreover, a large number of articles were devoted to physics, technical sciences, and life sciences.

Z. Babutsidze [ 5 ] studied arrays of downloaded articles on economic topics [ 1 ] from TOP 5 economic journals: American Economic Review , Quarterly Journal of Economics , Journal of Political Economy , Econometrica , and Review of Economic Studies . He noted the small number of articles from these journals; requests for them come from underdeveloped countries.

G. Cabanac [ 6 ], using the same data, found that 36% of all articles are available on the Library Genesis (LibGen) open platform, which is paired with Sci-Hub. It was also noted that 68% of the articles from Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley are available on LibGen. At the same time, [ 7 ] gave a figure of 83% for articles from the same publishers.

D. Himmelstein et al. [ 8 ] found that Sci-Hub provides free access to more than 85% of the scientific articles from subscription journals, as well as to 97% of the articles from Elsevier, which, as we know, has repeatedly sued this pirated resource.

S. Nazarovets [ 9 ] used the data of [ 1 ] to obtain the distribution of articles downloaded by Ukrainian researchers by publishing houses and regions; he identified the main areas of knowledge that correspond to these articles (chemistry, physics, and astronomy accounted for 69% of the articles; medical and pharmaceutical sciences, 13%; life sciences, 12%; and social sciences, 6%) and the most common journals ( Journal of the American Chemical Society , 6769 articles; Organic Chemistry , 6038; Physical Review B , 4325; and Medicinal Chemistry , 3712 articles).

In [ 10 ], using the access of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) to European Studies journals, journals with IF (WoS) > 1 were selected. Their analysis together with the data on the download of articles from [ 1 ] revealed that readers are mainly interested in issues related to populism, extremism, and the economic crisis.

According to the data of the same work [ 1 ], D. Androćec [ 11 ] studied publications in the field of computer science, which turned out to be 5.95% of the total number of publications, and cited the 20 most popular articles. The first five countries whose researchers downloaded articles on the sciences were India, Iran, China, United States, and Indonesia. Russia was in seventh place on this ranking list with 46 659 articles.

B. Greshake [ 12 ] showed that, out of 62 million articles pirated through Sci-Hub, 80% are from nine publishers.

We present an overview of publications (with the exception of article [ 9 ]), for 2016–2017, based on the empirical basis of work [ 1 ]. However, in addition to the statistical analysis of articles downloaded from the Sci-Hub, research was conducted in parallel by surveys of users of this pirated resource. We only note work [ 13 ], which describes the results of the large-scale Early career researchers (ECRs) project, which motivated 106 young researchers from seven countries (Great Britain, Israel, Spain, China, Malaysia, Poland, and France) to use Sci-Hub. These researchers were interviewed annually for 3 years. It was shown that the popularity of Sci-Hub was growing: in 2016 this resource was used by 6% of the project participants, in 2018 it was used by 25%. It was most popular among young researchers in France. It was also shown that Sci-Hub is heavily blocked in China, but it has its own pirate resource 91lib.com. Even if university libraries are well stocked with subscriptions to scholarly periodicals, Sci-Hub is preferred for convenience over licensed access through the libraries. It is noted that the ResearchGate network was used by 75% of the project participants.

One of the most recent surveys of researchers and students about their dependence on Sci-Hub was published in early January 2021 on the Indian SpicyIP repository of blogs on intellectual property and innovation policy [ 14 ]. From December 22, 2020 to January 2, 2021, 212 respondents were interviewed, of which 140 (66%) strongly depended on Sci-Hub on a ten-point scale (8–10 points). Before the COVID-19 pandemic, 51.9% of respondents preferred to receive articles through their libraries (48.1% through Sci-Hub), while during the pandemic, this ratio changed in favor of Sci-Hub (164 respondents or 77.3% strongly depended on Sci-Hub to access paid resources).

In conclusion to our review, we note that the articles downloaded from Sci-Hub are cited 2.21 times more often than those not downloaded from this resource [ 15 ]. This review, including all articles identified through Google Scholar, has shown that there is no research into downloading pirated articles from Sci-Hub by Russian researchers. Here, we try to fill this gap.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Data of work [ 1 ] consist of 6 files with the extension “*.tab;” files with the extension.tab; each of them reflects the requests of users for a certain period.

The files contain

• the date and time of the request;

• DOI identifier, which includes the code of the publisher and the code of a specific article in the journal, generated by the publisher;

• the user’s IP address;

• the name of the country;

• the city name;

• the geographic coordinates, latitude and longitude.

Along with the data of six files, a file of articles in the CSV format was downloaded, which contains

▪ the name of the publisher;

▪ publisher prefix;

▪ the date of the last save;

▪ the date of the last request.

To obtain the results, only requests from Russian IP addresses were selected. Using the PyCharm development environment and the Python programming language, the source files were processed and the results of the downloading of articles by Russian researchers were obtained.

When processing the source file of articles, it turned out that if the names of publishers are selected by prefix, the number of downloaded articles will be 1 780 431, which does not correspond to the number of downloaded articles by cities of Russia, equal 1 521 434. The discrepancy is due to duplicate publishing lines in the original file. When a file with initial data on the number of downloaded articles is processed and the names of publications are found by prefixes, then the union of two frame dates is used, similar to join in SQL. Thus, duplicate lines are also counted and this results in an extra number of articles. After removing duplication, the number of articles with Russian IP-addresses was 1 521 434.

When processing the data, it was also noted that the total number of downloaded articles by country is not equal to the total number of downloaded articles by city. The reason lies in the source files: some of the data lines are missing the name of the city, instead of this N/A occurs. The number of lines with this value was counted; it was 29 264. Thus, 1 492 170 lines were analyzed, which corresponds to the number of articles downloaded in Russia.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

We present the results of processing the data of [ 1 ] on the distribution of downloaded articles by publishing houses, cities, and regions of Russia.

Table 1 shows a ranked list of publishers with at least 900 downloads of these articles.

The distribution by publisher of articles downloaded by Russian researchers from the resource Sci-Hub

Table 1 data were compared with similar results for Ukraine obtained by Sergei Nazarovets [ 9 ]. To do this, we combined data on Springer-Verlag and the Nature Publishing Group, receiving a total of 206 153 articles, and data on Wiley Blackwell (Blackwell Publishing) and Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons), receiving a total of 120 391 articles. For the five leading publishers with the largest number of their articles downloaded by Russian researchers, we get the following excess over the downloads of articles by Ukrainian researchers: Elsevier, 4.3; Springer Nature, 4.5; Wiley Blackwell, 4.2; American Chemical Society, 3.5; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 6.0. The list of leading publishers whose articles were downloaded was approximately the same for researchers in both countries.

In the process of data processing, 521 cities and settlements were identified, while in the last 35 cities one download was observed for the entire 6-month period. Among them are cities that are well known: Tuapse, Derbent, Mozdok, Nazran, and Pizhma. Table 2 provides information on the top 100 cities.

The distribution of pirated articles by Russian researchers in the Top 100 cities of Russia

*, Rural community, **, village.

Comparing the data in Table 2 with the data of [ 9 ], it can be seen that Moscow is 3.9 times ahead of Kiev in the downloading of articles, although Kiev has more downloaded articles per capita than Moscow (64 versus 60 per thousand people). The first cities in both countries are ahead of the second cities in terms of downloads by approximately the same number of times (5.1 and 5.2).

  The distribution of pirated articles by Russian researchers by regions of Russia

The slight difference in the downloading of articles for Moscow and St. Petersburg as regions (subjects) of the Russian Federation from the downloading for them as cities is due to the fact that their regions include small cities, such as Lomonosov and Peterhof for the St. Petersburg region (Table 3).

In comparison with the Ukrainian situation [ 9 ], the third largest Ukrainian region in terms of the number of pirated downloadings, the Kharkiv region [ 9 ], is inferior in this indicator, with the exception of the first two Russian cities, only to Moscow and Novosibirsk regions, as well as the Republic of Tatarstan.

CONCLUSIONS

On the basis of a large array of 28 million articles highlighted in [ 1 ] from the Sci-Hub resource, we identified publications pirated by Russian researchers. These publications are distributed among publishing houses, as well as cities and regions of Russia. Their first triplets looked like this: Elsevier, Springer-Verlag, American Chemical Society; Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk; Moscow, St. Petersburg as subjects of the Russian Federation, and the Moscow region.

We plan to continue processing the data by defining the distribution of the selected articles by field of research, as well as by journal. It would be relevant, in our opinion, to select data from Sci-Hub at the present time, for example, from September 1, 2021 to February 29, 2022, in order to get exactly a 6-year time interval relative to previous samples. There will then be an understanding of what kind of scientific information Russian researchers need.

Here are a few general thoughts on this phenomenon and its relationship to the open access movement. Paper [ 12 ] concluded that, despite the growth of Open Access, illegal access to scientific articles is becoming more widespread. For the 6-month period considered above, the scientists of Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia downloaded, respectively, 98 143, 78 535, and 26 634 articles, while for the whole of 2017 they have downloaded 868 322, 488 101 and 215 690 articles [ 16 ]. Thus, in terms of an annual period, the increase in pirate takings in these cities only a year later occurred by 4.4, 3.1, and 8.1 times. The same is occurring all over the world. Enthusiasts of the Open Access movement worked hard towards their goal, and 11– 12 years after the launch of this movement, one single, but even greater, enthusiast instantly opened almost 100% access to scientific publications. This access can be called the Black Open Access Revolution. The young student of communist views brought all commercial publishers to their knees and caught government officials around the world by surprise. None of their lawsuits and no government bans are in force here. Publishers have not felt any losses yet, since those who could get it legally, as well as scientists from underdeveloped countries, whose scientific organizations do not have money to access their content, receive illegal content. But they will soon feel it when scientific libraries begin to eliminate subscriptions, which will become unnecessary. This will serve well for the legal Open Access movement, because it will accelerate the transition of commercial subscription magazine publishers to the open access model; they will go bankrupt otherwise. When this happens, then the Sci-Hub pirate project will die out by itself, as Alexandra Elbakyan herself wrote.

Contributor Information

V. M. Moskovkin, Email: ur.ude.usb@nikvoksom .

N. N. Gakhova, Email: ur.ude.usb@avohag .

A. Yu. Nabokov, Email: ur.ude.usb@3522721 .

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Sci-Hub: Russian neuroscientist running 'Pirate Bay for scientists' with 48 million free academic papers

Sci-Hub, a website dubbed the "Pirate Bay for scientists" by offering peer-reviewed academic papers to download for free, is thumbing its nose at copyright holders following an infringement lawsuit battle in the US.

Sci-Hub is the brainchild of Alexandra Elbakyan, a neuroscientist from Kazakhstan who is now based in Russia. When she was writing her thesis in 2009, Elbakyan found it difficult to access the research she needed to complete her work, as she needed to download many papers, and each paper retailed for up to $30 (£21) each.

To get through her thesis, Elbakyan was forced to download pirated versions of the academic papers for free, and eventually, after being introduced to a website that enabled researchers to share and trade the academic papers they needed with people who had paid for them, she decided to take the idea further and create her own website around 2011 or 2012.

Tricking journals with university proxies

Today, the Sci-Hub website boasts 48 million academic papers and has now gone viral, because it features technology similar to anonymising proxy websites. Rather than just enabling users to search for and extract the papers they need, the Sci-Hub website is programmed to automatically search for papers on important topics and work out how to download them to its database without spending a penny.

Since various universities in the world have paid subscriber access to different premium journal services, the website is able to automatically trawl through different university proxies to trick the relevant journal's website into believing that the user accessing the academic paper has the relevant credentials similar to a paying customer.

Once the paper is unlocked, Sci-Hub then downloads the paper to its database and even looks for other missing papers on similar topics to download, so that all the researcher has to do is initiate a search, and the paper will come up, ready to be downloaded for nothing.

Apart from using Sci-Hub, the only way for researchers to gain access to research papers without paying for them is to ask people they know, or post on Twitter using the hashtag #Icanhazpdf .

Sued for copyright infringement and blocked in the US

At its peak in 2015, the website received 80,000 visitors a day, according to Nature magazine , and had become so popular that academic publisher Elsevier brought a copyright lawsuit against the website, claiming that it had lost between $75,000 - $150,000 in revenue due to the piracy.

On 28 October 2015, a New York district court found in favour of Elsevier and placed a temporary injunction against Sci-Hub, as well as suspending access to the website's Sci-Hub.org domain, which has caused visitor numbers to drop to 30,000 a day. But other than that, not much else can be done to physically stop Elbakyan as she has no US assets to forfeit nor is she a US citizen, so, just like Pirate Bay's multiple domain names , she quickly moved the website to Sci-Hub.io, where it continues to be freely accessible.

"There should be no obstacles to accessing knowledge, I believe," Elbakyan told RT . "[According to Article 27 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights], everyone has the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits."

Moving to the Dark Web

Not only that, but Elbakyan has also moved Sci-Hub's servers onto the Dark Web – a section of the internet not discoverable by conventional means, such as through Google or other search engines or by directly entering a website URL. This is where cybercriminals typically list illegal goods and services like drugs, firearms and hackers-for-hire and using the Tor anonymity network as a cloak to protect their real identities.

Even better, there are a huge number of scientists in the world actively supporting Sci-Hub and even posting YouTube tutorials on how to download papers for free from the piracy portal, especially since revolting against Elsevier's high prices in 2012, with even Harvard University telling its staff that it could no longer afford the journal price hikes in the same year.

"Even if legal access to [Sci-Hub] is blocked, the user can still get in through the TOR network and immediately gain access to all the articles," said Elbakyan. "However, we intend to fight for free access to all information. After all, using TOR still provides obstacles."

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Russian Index of Science Citation: Overview and review

• Published: 27 April 2018
• Volume 116 , pages 449–462, ( 2018 )

Cite this article

• Olga Moskaleva 1 ,
• Vladimir Pislyakov   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4889-9858 2 ,
• Ivan Sterligov 3 ,
• Mark Akoev 4 &
• Svetlana Shabanova 5  

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In early 2016 a new database was launched on the Web of Science platform—Russian Science Citation Index. The database is free to all Web of Science subscribers except those from the post-Soviet states. This database includes papers from 652 selected Russian journals and is based on the data from national citation index—Russian Index of Science Citation (RISC). RISC was launched in 2005 but it is scarcely known to the English-language audience. The paper describes the history, current structure and user possibilities of RISC. We focus on the novel features of RISC which are crucial to bibliometrics and are unavailable in the international citation indexes.

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An extreme change in multidisciplinary category in Fig.  8 most probably may be ascribed to different definitions of multidisciplinarity in the databases.

This official list of journals certified by the Higher Attestation Commission (Russian abbreviation is VAK) of the Ministry of Education and Science serves as a kind of “white list” of Russian journals and is used alongside with the WoS and Scopus for assessing those scientists who aim to receive Russian PhD. As of April 2018, this list contains 2289 journals selected by expert panels after being nominated by Russian academic institutions and publishers. It may be easily found in Internet, a shortcut link made on 17 April 2018 is https://tinyurl.com/VAKjournals (may change later if a new version of the list comes).

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Acknowledgements

The present study is an extended version of an article presented at the 16th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics, Wuhan, China, 16–20 October 2017 (Moskaleva et al. 2017 ). We are grateful to Gennadiy Eremenko, CEO of eLIBRARY.RU, for his invaluable help. We thank Natalia Maksimova, Higher School of Economics Library Director, for arranging HSE access to bibliometric databases and her continuous support. M.A. thanks RFBR/RFH for support of this research (grant #14-03-00333). We also thank Vasiliy Pislyakov for his help in data mining.

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Moskaleva, O., Pislyakov, V., Sterligov, I. et al. Russian Index of Science Citation: Overview and review. Scientometrics 116 , 449–462 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2758-y

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Hamas Took Her, and Still Has Her Husband

The story of one family at the center of the war in gaza..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

I can’t remember the word, but do you know the kind of fungi connection between trees in the forest? How do you call it?

Mycelium. We are just — I just somehow feel that we are connected by this kind of infinite web of mycelium. We are so bound together. And I don’t think we really realized that until all this happened.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It’s quite hard to explain, to me in a sense, because some people would say, oh, I’m so hoping your father will come, and then everything will be OK. And it’s very hard to explain that really this group of people decided to bring us up together, shared all their resources over 75 years, grow into each other, fight endlessly with each other, love and hate each other but somehow stay together. And their children will then meet and marry and make grandchildren.

And there’s so many levels of connection. And I’m sitting here in the room, and I see their faces, some of them. And we are incredibly — it’s hard to explain how much these people are missing from our kind of forest ground. [CHUCKLES SOFTLY]

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise, and this is “The Daily.”

It’s been nearly six months since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and took more than 200 people into Gaza. One of the hardest hit places was a village called Nir Oz, near the border with Gaza. One quarter of its residents were either killed or taken hostage.

Yocheved Lifshitz was one of those hostages and so was her husband, Oded Lifshitz. Yocheved was eventually released. Oded was not.

Today, the story of one family at the center of the war.

It’s Friday, March 29.

OK, here we go. OK.

Good morning, Yocheved. Good morning, Sharone.

Good morning.

Yocheved, could you identify yourself for me, please? Tell me your name, your age and where you’re from.

[SPEAKING HEBREW]

OK, I’ll translate. My name is Yocheved Lifshitz. I’m 85 years old. I was born in 1938. When I was 18, I arrived at kibbutz Nir Oz. I came alone with a group of people who decided to come and form and build a community on a very sandy territory, which was close to the Gaza Strip.

And my name is Sharone Lifschitz. I am 52 years old. I was raised in kibbutz Nir Oz by my mom and dad. So I lived there until I was 20. And I live for the last 30-something years in London.

And, Sharone, what do you have next to you?

Next to me I have a poster of my dad in both English and Hebrew. And it says, “Oded Lifshitz, 83.” And below that it says, “Bring him home now.” And it’s a photo where I always feel the love because he is looking at me. And there’s a lot of love in it in his eyes.

And why did you want to bring him here today, Sharone?

Because he should be talking himself. He should be here and able to tell his story. And instead, I’m doing it on his behalf. It should have been a story of my mom and dad sitting here and telling their story.

The story of Oded and Yocheved began before they ever met in Poland in the 1930s. Anti-Semitism was surging in Europe, and their families decided to flee to Palestine — Yocheved’s in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, and Oded’s a year later. Yocheved remembers a time near the end of the war, when her father received news from back home in Poland. He was deeply religious, a cantor in a synagogue. And he gathered his family around him to share what he’d learned.

And he said, we don’t have a family anymore. They’ve all been murdered. And he explained to us why there is no God. If there was a God, he would have protected my family. And this means that there is no God.

And suddenly, we stopped going to synagogue. We used to go every Saturday.

So it was a deep crisis for him. The shock and the trauma were very deep.

Abstention.

Abstention. Soviet Union? Yes. Yes. The United Kingdom? Abstained.

Yocheved’s father lived long enough to see a state establish for his children. The UN resolution of 1947 paved the way for a new country for Jews. And the next spring, Israel declared its independence. Yocheved remembers listening to the news on the radio with her parents.

The General Assembly of the United Nations has made its decision on Palestine.

We had a country. So now we’ll have somebody who’s protecting us. It’s a country for the people, to rebuild the people. This was the feeling we had.

In other words, if God could not protect you, this nation maybe could?

Yes. But the next day, it was already sad.

Israel was immediately forced to defend itself when its Arab neighbors attacked. Israel won that war. But its victory came at a great cost to the Palestinian Arabs living there. More than 700,000 either fled or were expelled from their homes. Many became refugees in Gaza in the south.

Suddenly, Yocheved and Oded saw themselves differently from their parents, not as minorities in someone else’s country, but as pioneers in a country of their own, ready to build it and defend it. They moved to the south, near the border line with Gaza. It was there, in a kibbutz, where they met for the first time.

The first time I met him, he was 16, and I was 17. And we didn’t really have this connection happening. But when we arrived at Nir Oz, that’s where some sort of a connection started to happen. And he was younger than I am by a year and a half. So at first I thought, he’s a kid. But for some reason, he insisted. Oded really insisted. And later, turned out he was right.

What was it about him that made you fall in love with him?

He was cute.

He was a cute kid. He was a cute boy.

What’s so funny?

He was a philosopher. He wrote a lot. He worked in agriculture. He was this cute boy. He was only 20, think about it.

And then I married him. And he brought two things with him. He brought a dog and he brought a cactus. And since then we’ve been growing a huge field of cacti for over 64 years.

What did it feel like to be starting a new life together in this new country? What was the feeling of that?

We were euphoric.

And what did you think you were building together?

We thought we were building a kibbutz. We were building a family. We were having babies. That was the vision. And we were thinking that we were building a socialist state, an equal state. And at first, it was a very isolated place. There were only two houses and shacks and a lot of sand. And little by little, we turned that place into a heaven.

Building the new state meant cultivating the land. Oded plowed the fields, planting potatoes and carrots, wheat and cotton. Yocheved was in charge of the turkeys and worked in the kitchen cooking meals for the kibbutz. They believed that the best way to live was communally. So they shared everything — money, food, even child-rearing.

After long days in the fields, Oded would venture outside the kibbutz to the boundary line with Gaza and drink beer with Brazilian peacekeepers from the UN and talk with Palestinians from the villages nearby. They talked about politics and life in Arabic, a language Oded spoke fluently. These were not just idle conversations. Oded knew that for Israel to succeed, it would have to figure out how to live side by side with its Arab neighbors.

He really did not believe in black and white, that somebody is the bad guy and somebody is the good guy, but there is a humanistic values that you can live in.

Sharone, what was your father like?

My father was a tall man and a skinny man. And he was —

he is — first of all, he is — he is a man who had very strong opinion and very well formed opinion. He read extensively. He thought deeply about matters. And he studied the piano. But as he said, was never that great or fast enough for classical. But he always played the piano.

[PIANO MUSIC]

He would play a lot of Israeli songs. He wound play Russian songs. He would play French chansons.

And he had this way of just moving from one song to the next, making it into a kind of pattern. And it was — it’s really the soundtrack of our life, my father playing the piano.

[PLAYING PIANO]:

[CONVERSATION IN HEBREW]:

[PLAYING PIANO]

So one side of him was the piano. Another side was he was a peace activist. He was not somebody who just had ideals about building bridges between nations. He was always on the left side of the political map, and he actioned it.

[NON-ENGLISH CHANTING]:

I remember growing up and going very regularly, almost weekly, to demonstrations. I will go regularly with my father on Saturday night to demonstrations in Tel Aviv. I will sit on his shoulders. He will be talking to all his activist friends. The smoke will rise from the cigarettes, and I will sit up there.

But somehow, we really grew up in that fight for peace.

Yocheved and Oded’s formal fight for peace began after the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Israel had captured new territory, including the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Gaza Strip. That brought more than a million Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

Oded immediately began to speak against it. Israel already had its land inside borders that much of the world had agreed to. In his view, taking more was wrong. It was no longer about Jewish survival. So when Israeli authorities began quietly pushing Bedouin Arabs off their land in the Sinai Peninsula, Oded took up the cause.

He helped file a case in the Israeli courts to try to stop it. And he and Yocheved worked together to draw attention to what was going on. Yocheved was a photographer, so she took pictures showing destroyed buildings and bulldozed land. Oded then put her photographs on cardboard and drove around the country showing them to people everywhere.

They became part of a growing peace movement that was becoming a force helping shape Israeli politics. Israel eventually returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1982.

[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]

Whenever there is a movement towards reconciliation with our neighbors, it’s almost like your ability to live here, your life force, gets stronger. And in a way, you can think of the art of their activism as being a response to that.

And why did he and your mother take up that fight, the cause of the land? Why do you think that was what he fought for?

My father, he had a very developed sense of justice. And he always felt that had we returned those lands at that point, we could have reached long-term agreement at that point. Then we would have been in a very different space now. I know that in 2019, for example, he wrote a column, where he said that when the Palestinians of Gaza have nothing to lose, we lose big time. He believed that the way of living in this part of the world is to share the place, to reach agreement, to work with the other side towards agreements.

He was not somebody who just had ideals about building bridges between nations. Two weeks before he was taken hostage, he still drove Palestinians that are ill to reach hospital in Israel and in East Jerusalem. That was something that meant a lot to him. I think he really believed in shared humanity and in doing what you can.

Do you remember the last conversation you had with your father?

I don’t have a clear memory which one it was. It’s funny. A lot of things I forgot since. A lot of things have gone so blurred.

We actually didn’t have a last conversation. The last thing he said was, Yoche, there is a war. And he was shot in the hand, and he was taken out. And I was taken out. I couldn’t say goodbye to him. And what was done to us was done.

We’ll be right back.

Yocheved, the last thing Oded said was there’s a war. Tell me about what happened that day from the beginning.

That morning, there was very heavy shelling on Nir Oz. We could hear gunfire. And we looked outside, and Oded told me, there are a lot of terrorists outside. We didn’t even have time to get dressed. I was still wearing my nightgown. He was wearing very few clothes. I remember him trying to close the door to the safe room, but it didn’t work. He wasn’t successful in closing it.

And then five terrorists walked in. They shot him through the safe room door. He was bleeding from his arm. He said to me, Yoche, I’m injured. And then he fainted. He was dragged out on the floor. And I didn’t know if he was alive. I thought he was dead. After that, I was taken in my nightgown. I was led outside. I was placed on a small moped, and I was taken to Gaza.

And we were driving over a bumpy terrain that had been plowed. And it didn’t break my ribs, but it was very painful.

And I could see that the gate that surrounds the Gaza Strip was broken, and we were driving right through it.

And as we were heading in, I could see so many people they were yelling, “Yitbach al Yahud,” kill the Jews, slaughter the Jews. And people were hitting me with sticks. And though the drivers on the moped tried to protect me, it didn’t help.

What were you thinking at the time? What was in your mind?

I was thinking, I’m being taken; I’m being kidnapped. I didn’t know where to, but this decision I had in my head was that I’m going to take photographs in my mind and capture everything I’m seeing so that when I — or if and when I am released, I’ll have what to tell.

And when I came to a stop, we were in a village that’s near Nir Oz. It’s called Khirbet Khuza. We came in on the moped, but I was transferred into a private car from there. And I was threatened that my hand would be cut off unless I hand over my watch and my ring. And I didn’t have a choice, so I took my watch off, and I took my ring off, and I handed it to them.

Was it your wedding ring?

Yes, it was my wedding ring.

After that, they led me to a big hangar where the entrance to the tunnel was, and I started walking. And the entrance was at ground level, but as you walk, you’re walking down a slope. And you’re walking and walking about 40 meters deep underground, and the walls are damp, and the soil is damp. And at first, I was alone. I didn’t know that other people had been taken too. But then more hostages came, and we were walking together through the tunnels.

Many of whom were from kibbutz Nir Oz. These were our people. They were abducted but still alive. And we spoke quietly, and we spoke very little. But as we were walking, everybody started telling a story of what had happened to him. And that created a very painful picture.

There were appalling stories about murder. People had left behind a partner.

A friend arrived, who, about an hour or two hours before, had her husband murdered and he died in her hands.

It was a collection of broken up people brought together.

So you were piecing together the story of your community and what had happened from these snapshots of tragedies that you were looking at all around you as you were walking. What’s the photograph you’ll remember most from that day?

It would be a girl, a four-year-old girl. People kept telling her — walk, walk, walk. And we tried to calm her down. And her mom tried to carry her on her arms. It was the most difficult sight to see a child inside those tunnels.

What were you feeling at that moment, Yocheved?

Very difficult.

Where did they lead you — you and your community — from Nir Oz.

They led us to this chamber, a room, that they had prepared in advance. There were mattresses there. And that’s where we were told to sit.

I saw people sitting on the mattresses, bent down, their heads down between their hands. They were broken. But we hardly spoke. Everybody was inside their own world with themselves, closed inside his own personal shock.

Yocheved was without her glasses, her hearing aids, or even her shoes. She said she spent most days lying down on one of the mattresses that had been put out for the hostages. Sometimes her captors would let her and others walk up and down the tunnels to stretch their legs.

She said she was given a cucumber, spreading cheese, and a piece of pita bread every day to eat. They had a little bit of coffee in the morning and water all day long.

One day, a Hamas leader came to the room where she and others were being held. She said she believes it was Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, who is believed to be the architect of the October 7 attack. Two other hostages who were held with Yocheved also identified the man as Sinwar, and an Israeli military spokesman said he found the accounts reliable.

He came accompanied with a group of other men. He just made rounds between the hostages, I suppose. And he spoke in Hebrew, and he told us not to worry, and soon there’s going to be a deal and we’ll be out. And others told me, don’t speak. And I said, what is there for me to be afraid of? The worst already happened. Worst thing, I’ll be killed.

I want to say something, and I spoke my mind. I told Sinwar, why have you done what you just did to all of the same people who have always helped you? He didn’t answer me. He just turned around and they walked off.

Were you afraid to ask him why Hamas did what it did, to challenge him?

I wasn’t afraid.

I was angry about the whole situation. It was against every thought and thinking we ever had. It was against our desire to reach peace, to be attentive and help our neighbors the way we always wanted to help our neighbors. I was very angry. But he ignored what I said, and he just turned his back and walked away.

In this entire time, you had no answers about Oded?

What was the hardest day for you, the hardest moment in captivity?

It’s when I got sick. I got sick with diarrhea and vomiting for about four days. And I had no idea how this will end. It was a few very rough days. And probably because of that, they decided to free me.

They didn’t tell me they were going to release me. They just told me and another girl, come follow us. They gave us galabiya gowns to wear and scarves to wear over our heads, so maybe they’ll think that we are Arab women. And only as we were walking, and we started going through corridors and ladders and climbing up we were told that we’re going home.

I was very happy to be going out. But my heart ached so hard for those who were staying behind. I was hoping that many others would follow me.

It’s OK. Let’s go. It’s OK. Let’s go.

You go with this one.

Shalom. Shalom.

There was a video that was made of the moment you left your captors. And it seemed to show that you were shaking a hand, saying shalom to them. Do you remember doing that?

I said goodbye to him. It was a friendly man. He was a medic. So when we said goodbye, I shook his hand for peace, shalom, to goodbye.

What did you mean when you said that?

I meant for peace.

Shalom in the sense of peace.

An extraordinary moment as a freed Israeli hostage shakes hands with a Hamas terrorist who held her captive.

I literally saw my mom on CNN on my phone on the way to the airport. And it was the day before I was talking to my aunt, and she said, I just want to go to Gaza and pull them out of the earth. I just want to pull them out of the earth and take them. And it really felt like that, that she came out of the earth. And when she shook the hand of the Hamas person, it just made me smile because it was so her to see the human in that person and to acknowledge him as a human being.

I arrived in the hospital at about 5:30 AM. My mom was asleep in the bed. And she was just — my mom sleeps really peacefully. She has a really quiet way of sleeping. And I just sat there, and it was just like a miracle to have her back with us. It was just incredible because not only was she back, but it was her.

I don’t know how to explain it. But while they were away, we knew so little. We were pretty sure she didn’t survive it. The whole house burned down totally. So other homes we could see if there was blood on the walls or blood on the floor. But in my parents’ home, everything was gone — everything. And we just didn’t know anything. And out of that nothingness, came my mom back.

It was only when she got to the hospital that Yocheved learned the full story of what happened on October 7. Nir Oz had been mostly destroyed. Many of her friends had been murdered. No one knew what had happened to Oded. Yocheved believed he was dead. But there wasn’t time to grieve.

The photograph she had taken in her mind needed to be shared. Yocheved knew who was still alive in the tunnels. So she and her son called as many families as they could — the family of the kibbutz’s history teacher, of one of its nurses, of the person who ran its art gallery — to tell them that they were still alive, captive in Gaza.

And then in November came a hostage release. More than 100 people came out. The family was certain that Oded was gone. But Sharone decided to make some calls anyway. She spoke to one former neighbor then another. And finally, almost by chance, she found someone who’d seen her father. They shared a room together in Gaza before he’d gotten ill and was taken away. Sharone and her brothers went to where Yocheved was staying to tell her the news.

She just couldn’t believe it, actually. It was as if, in this great telenovela of our life, at one season, he was left unconscious on the floor. And the second season open, and he is in a little room in Gaza with another woman that we know. She couldn’t believe it.

She was very, very, very excited, also really worried. My father was a very active and strong man. And if it happened 10 years ago, I would say of course he would survive it. He would talk to them in Arabic. He will manage the situation. He would have agency. But we know he was injured. And it makes us very, very worried about the condition in which he was — he’s surviving there. And I think that the fear of how much suffering the hostages are going through really makes you unable to function at moment.

Yocheved, the government has been doing a military operation since October in Gaza. You have been fighting very hard since October to free the hostages, including Oded. I wonder how you see the government’s military operation. Is it something that harms your cause or potentially helps it?

The only thing that will bring them back are agreements. And what is happening is that there are many soldiers who have been killed, and there is an ongoing war, and the hostages are still in captivity. So it’s only by reaching an agreement that all of the hostages will be released.

Do you believe that Israel is close to reaching an agreement?

I don’t know.

You told us that after the Holocaust, your father gathered your family together to tell you that God did not save you. It was a crisis for him. I’m wondering if this experience, October 7, your captivity, challenged your faith in a similar way.

No, I don’t think it changed me. I’m still the same person with the same beliefs and opinions. But how should I say it? What the Hamas did was to ruin a certain belief in human beings. I didn’t think that one could reach that level that isn’t that much higher than a beast. But my opinion and my view of there still being peace and reaching an arrangement stayed the same.

You still believe in peace?

Why do you believe that?

Because I’m hoping that a new generation of leaders will rise, people who act in transparency, who speak the truth, people who are honest, the way Israel used to be and that we’ll return to be like we once were.

I go to many rallies and demonstrations, and I meet many people in many places. And a large part of those people still believe in reaching an arrangement in peace and for there to be no war. And I still hope that this is what we’re going to be able to have here.

Bring them home now! Bring them home now! Bring them home now! Bring them home now! Bring them home! Now! Bring them home! Now! Bring them home! Now! Bring them home!

Yocheved is now living in a retirement home in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. Five other people around her age from Nir Oz live there too. One is also a released hostage. She hasn’t been able to bring herself to go back to the kibbutz. The life she built there with Oded is gone — her photographs, his records, the piano. And the kibbutz has become something else now, a symbol instead of a home. It is now buzzing with journalists and politicians. For now, Yocheved doesn’t know if she’ll ever go back. And when Sharone asked her, she said, let’s wait for Dad.

So I’m today sitting in this assisted living, surrounded by the same company, just expecting Oded, waiting for Oded to come back. And then each and every one of us will be rebuilding his own life together and renewing it.

What are you doing to make it a home for Oded?

We have a piano. We were given a piano, a very old one with a beautiful sound. And it’s good. Oded is very sensitive to the sound. He has absolute hearing. And I’m just hoping for him to come home and start playing the piano.

Do you believe that Oded will come home?

I’d like to believe. But there’s a difference between believing and wanting. I want to believe that he’ll be back and playing music. I don’t think his opinions are going to change. He’s going to be disappointed by what happened. But I hope he’s going to hold on to the same beliefs. His music is missing from our home.

[SPEAKING HEBEW]:

[SPEAKING HEBREW] [PLAYING PIANO]

I know that my father always felt that we haven’t given peace a chance. That was his opinion. And I think it’s very hard to speak for my father because maybe he has changed. Like my mom said, she said, I hope he hasn’t changed. I haven’t changed. But the truth is we don’t know. And we don’t the story. We don’t know how the story — my father is ending or just beginning.

But I think you have to hold on to humanistic values at this point. You have to know what you don’t want. I don’t want more of this. This is hell. This is hell for everybody. So this is no, you know? And then I believe that peace is also gray, and it’s not glorious, and it’s not simple. It’s kind of a lot of hard work. You have to reconcile and give up a lot. And it’s only worth doing that for peace.

[PIANO PLAYING CONTINUES]

After weeks of negotiations, talks over another hostage release and ceasefire have reached an impasse. The sticking points include the length of the ceasefire and the identity and number of Palestinian prisoners to be exchanged for the hostages.

[BACKGROUND CONVERSATION IN HEBREW]:

Here’s what else you should know today. Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday, capping an extraordinary saga that upended the multi-trillion-dollar crypto industry. Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, was convicted of wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering last November.

Prosecutors accused him of stealing more than $10 billion from customers to finance political contributions, venture capital investments, and other extravagant purchases. At the sentencing, the judge pointed to testimony from Bankman-Fried’s trial, saying that his appetite for extreme risk and failure to take responsibility for his crimes amount to a quote, “risk that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future.”

Today’s episode was produced by Lynsea Garrison and Mooj Zaidie with help from Rikki Novetsky and Shannon Lin. It was edited by Michael Benoist, fact checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Diane Wong, Elisheba Ittoop, and Oded Lifshitz. It was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. The translation was by Gabby Sobelman. Special thanks to Menachem Rosenberg, Gershom Gorenberg, Gabby Sobelman, Yotam Shabtie, and Patrick Kingsley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you on Monday.

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Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise

Produced by Lynsea Garrison and Mooj Zadie

With Rikki Novetsky and Shannon Lin

Edited by Michael Benoist

Original music by Marion Lozano ,  Dan Powell ,  Diane Wong and Elisheba Ittoop

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

Warning: this episode contains descriptions of violence.

It’s been nearly six months since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel, when militants took more than 200 hostages into Gaza.

In a village called Nir Oz, near the border, one quarter of residents were either killed or taken hostage. Yocheved Lifshitz and her husband, Oded Lifshitz, were among those taken.

Today, Yocheved and her daughter Sharone tell their story.

On today’s episode

Yocheved Lifshitz, a former hostage.

Sharone Lifschitz, daughter of Yocheved and Oded Lifshitz.

Background reading

Yocheved Lifshitz was beaten and held in tunnels built by Hamas for 17 days.

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

Fact-checking by Susan Lee .

Additional music by Oded Lifshitz.

Translations by Gabby Sobelman .

Special thanks to Menachem Rosenberg, Gershom Gorenberg , Gabby Sobelman , Yotam Shabtie, and Patrick Kingsley .

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Summer Thomad, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson and Nina Lassam.

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Russia's Vladimir Putin hails election victory, but critics make presence known despite harsh suppression

Updated on: March 18, 2024 / 8:55 AM EDT / CBS/AP

President Vladimir Putin basked in an election victory that was never in doubt as officials said Monday that he'd won his fifth term with a record number of votes, underlining the Russian leader's total control of the country's political system. After facing only token challengers and harshly suppressing opposition voices, Putin extended his nearly quarter-century rule for six more years .

As CBS News senior foreign correspondent Elizabeth Palmer reports, the highly-predictable election results set Putin up to be the longest serving Russian leader in 200 years. But there were small acts of visible protest against the voting, which was held just one month after Putin's most potent critic, opposition leader Alexey Navalny, died in a remote prison in Russia's far north.

Russia's Central Election Commission said Monday that with nearly 100% of all precincts counted, Putin had won 87.29% of the vote. Commission chief Ella Pamfilova said nearly 76 million voters cast their ballots for Putin, his highest vote tally ever.  

Putin, 71, hailed the overwhelming results as an indication of "trust" and "hope" in him. Critics saw his landslide win, however, as merely another reflection of the preordained nature of the election.

"Of course, we have lots of tasks ahead. But I want to make it clear for everyone: When we were consolidated, no one has ever managed to frighten us, to suppress our will and our self-conscience. They failed in the past and they will fail in the future," Putin said at a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Moscow early Monday, hours after the polls closed.

Putin on Navalny in prisoner swap

Putin referenced Navalny by name for the first time in public at the news conference, declaring that he was ready to release him in a swap for unidentified inmates in Western custody just days before the opposition leader's death.

"As for Mr. Navalny. Yes, he passed away. This is always a sad event," AFP quotes him as saying, adding that Putin remarked that a colleague had proposed several days before Navalny died that Navalny be exchanged for "some people" currently held in Western nations.

"The person who was talking to me hadn't finished his sentence and I said 'I agree,'" AFP reports Putin said.

Navalny supporters have alleged that Putin ordered his killing on the eve of the swap, AFP notes. 

If he finishes his upcoming term, Putin will have been in power longer than any Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the 18th century, the French news agency AFP pointed out.

Public criticism of Putin and his war in Ukraine has been stifled in Russia. Independent media have been crippled. Former Putin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in  a plane explosion  in August 2023, two months after he led an armed rebellion against Moscow's military leadership. Putin's fiercest political foe, Navalny, died in prison last month, and other major critics are either dead, imprisoned  or in exile .

Beyond the fact that voters had virtually no choice, independent monitoring of the election was extremely limited.

Putin critics make their presence felt  

Even with little margin for protest, Russians crowded outside polling stations at noon on Sunday, the last day of the election, apparently heeding a call from Navalny's movement to express their displeasure with the president. 

Lines outside a number of polling stations both inside Russia and at its embassies around the world appeared to swell at that time.

Among those heeding call was Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny's widow, who spent more than five hours in the line at the Russian Embassy in Berlin. She told reporters that she wrote her late husband's name on her ballot.

Asked whether she had a message for Putin, Navalnaya replied: "Please stop asking for messages from me or from somebody for Mr. Putin. There could be no negotiations and nothing with Mr. Putin, because he's a killer, he's a gangster."

But Putin brushed off the effectiveness of the apparent protest.

"There were calls to come vote at noon. And this was supposed to be a manifestation of opposition. Well, if there were calls to come vote, then... I praise this," he said at a news conference after polls closed.

Some Russians waiting to vote in Moscow and St. Petersburg told The Associated Press they were taking part in the protest but it wasn't possible to confirm whether all of those in line were doing so. A voter in Moscow, who identified himself only as Vadim, said he hoped for change, but added that "unfortunately, it's unlikely." Like others, he didn't give his full name because of security concerns.

Meanwhile, supporters of Navalny streamed to his grave in Moscow, some bringing ballots with his name written on them.

Meduza, Russia's biggest independent news outlet, published photos of ballots it received from its readers, with "killer" inscribed on one and "The Hague awaits you" on another. The latter refers to an arrest warrant for Putin on war crimes charges from the International Criminal Court.

Several people were arrested, including in Moscow and St. Petersburg, after they tried to start fires or set off explosives at polling stations while others were detained for throwing green antiseptic or ink into ballot boxes.

Stanislav Andreychuk, co-chair of the Golos independent election watchdog, said Russians were searched when entering polling stations, there were attempts to check filled-out ballots before they were cast, and one report said police demanded a ballot box be opened to remove a ballot.

Some people told the AP they were happy to vote for Putin, however — unsurprising in a country where state TV airs a drumbeat of praise for the Russian leader and voicing any other opinion is risky.

Dmitry Sergienko, who cast his ballot in Moscow, said, "I am happy with everything and want everything to continue as it is now."

Reaction from around the world

Chinese President Xi Jinping, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the presidents of Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela quickly congratulated Putin on his victory, as did the leaders of the ex-Soviet Central Asian nations of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, while the West dismissed the vote as a sham.

British Foreign Secretary David Cameron wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter: "This is not what free and fair elections look like."

And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy assailed Putin as a "dictator" who was "drunk from power," AFP reported, adding that Zelenskyy said: "There is no evil he will not commit to prolong his personal power."

Voting was held across Russia as well as in Russian-occupied portions of Ukraine, a move that was condemned by more than 50 countries in a  joint statement  issued by the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller last week  referred to voting in occupied Ukraine  as "sham elections."

"The United States does not and will never recognize the legitimacy or outcome of these sham elections held in sovereign Ukraine as part of Russia's presidential elections," Miller said. 

When asked if the U.S. would recognize Putin as an elected president, Miller said, "We will watch the election, and I'm sure we'll have plenty to say when it concludes."  

• Vladimir Putin

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