"A conversation with Sci-Hub’s founder Alexandra Elbakyan"When the shadow library Sci-hub was founded in 2011, it was meant to remove “barriers in the way of science”, in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. Since then, its founder Kazakhstani programmer Alexandra Elbakyan often became a target of lawsuits for copyright infringement. The platform currently hosts more than 85 million scientific papers. This conversation previously appeared in a shorter version on [Netzpolitik.org](http://Netzpolitik.org) .