Alexandra Elbakyan

In December 2019 the Washington Post reported that Elbakyan was under investigation by the US Justice Department.

In December 2019, it was reported that the United States Department of Justice is investigating Elbakyan for suspected ties to Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU, to steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors. Elbakyan has denied this, saying that Sci-Hub “is not in any way directly affiliated with Russian or some other country’s intelligence,” but noting that “of course, there could be some indirect help. The same as with donations, anyone can send them; they are completely anonymous, so I do not know who exactly is donating to Sci-Hub.”

In 2018, Elbakyan asked supporters of Sci-Hub to join their local Pirate Party in order to fight for copyright laws to be changed.

Elbakyan and Sci-Hub were again involved in a lawsuit in 2017, this time with the American Chemical Society. ACS sued the site for copyright and trademark violations, and conversion. Later that year, the court ruled in favor of ACS, fining Sci-Hub $4,800,000 in damages.

In 2017 a species of parasitoid wasps discovered by Russian and Mexican entomologists was named after Elbakyan (Idiogramma elbakyanae). Elbakyan was offended by this, writing, "If you analyse the situation with scientific publications, the real parasites are scientific publishers, and Sci-Hub, on the contrary, fights for equal access to scientific information." Following this event, and in the context of her long-running tense relations with the liberal, pro-Western wing of the Russian scientific community, she blocked access to Sci-Hub for users from the Russian Federation. Sci-Hub access was later restored to Russia and Elbakyan said in an interview that many fans contacted her and convinced her "that the opinion of the so-called 'science popularizers' who attacked me on the Internet cannot be considered the opinion of the scientific community." The Russian entomologist responsible for naming the wasp stated that he supports Sci-Hub, and that in any event, the naming was not an insult, in particular because parasitoids are closer to predators than to parasites.

Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan (Russian: Алекса́ндра Аса́новна Элбакя́н ) is a Kazakhstani computer programmer, the creator of the site Sci-Hub, described as an Internet "pirate in hiding" & "Science's Pirate Queen". Nature has listed her in 2016 in the top ten people that mattered in science, Ars Technica has compared her to Aaron Swartz, and The New York Times has compared her to Edward Snowden.

She began Sci-Hub on her return to Kazakhstan in 2011, characterised by Science correspondent John Bohannon as "an awe-inspiring act of altruism or a massive criminal enterprise, depending on whom you ask." Following a lawsuit brought in the US by the publisher Elsevier, Elbakyan is presently in hiding due to the risk of extradition; Elsevier has been granted an injunction against her and $15 million in damages. According to a 2016 interview, her neuroscience research is on hold, but she has enrolled in a history of science master’s program at a "small private university" in an undisclosed location. Her thesis focuses on scientific communication. In December 2016, Nature Publishing Group named Alexandra Elbakyan as one of the 10 people who most mattered in science in 2016.

Elbakyan was born in Almaty, Kazakhstan on 6 November 1988. She is of Armenian, Slavic, and Asian descent. Elbakyan undertook university studies in Almaty, where she developed skills in computer hacking. A year working in computer security in Moscow gave her the finances to proceed to Freiburg in 2010 to work on a brain–computer interface project, and she developed an interest in transhumanism, which led her to a summer internship at Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States, where she studied "Neuroscience and Consciousness". In 2009 she obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the Kazakh National Technical University, specializing in information security.