Library Genesis

Library Genesis (LibGen) is a file-sharing based shadow library website for scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines. The site enables free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere.[1] LibGen describes itself as a "links aggregator", providing a searchable database of items "collected from publicly available public Internet resources" as well as files uploaded "from users".[2]

The Library Genesis Project
The project's homepage with the English interface
Type of site
Shadow library
Available inEnglish
URL
  • libgen.rs
  • libgen.is
  • libgen.st
  • libgen.li
  • libgen.gs
  • libgen.pm
  • libgen.click
  • llhlf.com
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional[notes 1]
Current statusActive
Part of a series on
File sharing
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Technologies
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By country or region
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LibGen provides access to copyrighted works, such as PDFs of content from Elsevier's ScienceDirect web-portal. Publishers like Elsevier have accused Library Genesis of internet piracy. Others assert that academic publishers unfairly benefit from government-funded research, written by researchers, many of whom are employed by public universities, and that LibGen is helping to disseminate research that should be freely available in the first place.[3]

History

Library Genesis has roots in the illegal underground samizdat culture in the Soviet Union.[4] In a society where access to printing was strictly controlled by heavy-handed censorship, dissident intellectuals hand copied and retyped manuscripts for secret circulation. This was legalized under Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, and expanded very rapidly at a time of affordable desktop computers and scanners, and very small research budgets.

The volunteers moved into the Russian computer network ("RuNet") in the 1990s, which became awash with hundreds of thousands of uncoordinated contributions. Librarians became especially active, using borrowed access passwords to download copies of scientific and scholarly articles from Western Internet sources, then uploading them to RuNet.

In the early 21st century, the efforts became coordinated, and integrated into one massive system known as Library Genesis, or LibGen, around 2008.[5][6][7] It subsequently absorbed the contents of, and became the functional successor to, library.nu, which was shut down by legal action in 2012.[8] By 2014, its catalog was more than twice the size of library.nu with 1.2 million records.[6] As of 28 July 2019, Library Genesis claims to have more than 2.4 million non-fiction books, 80 million science magazine articles, 2 million comics files, 2.2 million fiction books, and 0.4 million magazine issues.[9]

In 2020, the project was forked under an alternate domain, "libgen.fun", due to internal conflict within the project.[10] As a result, databases are being maintained independently and content differs between libgen.fun and other LibGen domains.

Litigation

In 2015, Library Genesis became involved in a legal case with Elsevier, which accused it of copyright infringement and granting free access to articles and books. In response, the admins accused Elsevier of gaining most of its profits from publicly funded research which should be freely available to all as they are paid for by taxpayers.[3]

In late October 2015, the District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered LibGen to shut down and to suspend use of the domain name (libgen.org),[11] but the site is accessible through alternate domains.[12][13]

Hosting country

LibGen is reported to be registered in both Russia and the Netherlands, making the appropriate jurisdiction for legal action unclear.[3][14]

Blocks

LibGen is blocked by a number of ISPs in the United Kingdom,[15] but such DNS-based blocks are claimed to do little to deter access.[3] It is also blocked by ISPs in France,[16] Germany,[17] Greece,[18] Italy,[19] Belgium (which redirects to the Belgian Federal Police blockpage),[20] and Russia (in November 2018).[21][22]

Usage

Until the end of 2014, Sci-Hub, which provides free access to millions of research papers and books, relied on LibGen as storage. Papers requested by users were requested from LibGen and served from there if available, otherwise they were fetched by other means and then stored on LibGen.[23]

In 2019 archivists and freedom of information activists launched a project to better seed and host LibGen's data dumps.[24] The project's spokesperson and coordinator 'shrine' described the effort as a way for a "permanent library card for the world" and reported that the response has been "overwhelmingly positive from everyone".[25] In 2020, the project launched a peer-to-peer digital library of content on Sci-Hub and Library Genesis using IPFS.[26][27]

See also

Further reading
  • Houle, Louis (2017) Sci-Hub and LibGen: what if… why not? Paper presented at: International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions WLIC 2017 – Wrocław, Poland – Libraries. Solidarity. Society. in Session S12 - Satellite Meeting: Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section and Acquisition and Collection Development. In: Open Access: Action Required, 16 – 17 August 2017, Gdańsk (Poland).
  • Karaganis, Joe, ed. (4 May 2018). Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education. MIT Press. doi:10.7551/mitpress/11339.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-262-53501-4.open access

Explanatory notes
  1. LibGen can be viewed, downloaded, uploaded without an account, but registration is required to view or read topics within its forum.

References
  1. Cabanac, Guillaume (April 2015). "Bibliogifts in LibGen? A study of a text-sharing platform driven by biblioleaks and crowdsourcing" (PDF). Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 67 (4): 874–884. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.698.4283. doi:10.1002/asi.23445. S2CID 6643023. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2 May 2018. Retrieved 28 November 2015.
  2. "About Us". libgen.me. Archived from the original on 14 August 2019. Retrieved 6 April 2020. The libgen.me links aggregator is a community aiming at collecting and cataloging items descriptions for the most part of scientific, scientific and technical directions, as well as file metadata. In addition to the descriptions, the aggregator contains only links to third-party resources hosted by users. All information posted on the website is collected from publicly available public Internet resources and is intended solely for informational purposes.
  3. Glance, David (15 June 2015). "Elsevier acts against research article pirate sites and claims irreparable harm". The Conversation (U.S. edition). Archived from the original on 11 April 2020. Retrieved 6 April 2020.
  4. Brown, Elizabeth Nolan (2022). "You Can't Stop Pirate Libraries". Reason. Archived from the original on 9 October 2022. Retrieved 9 October 2022.
  5. Joe Karaganis and Balazs Bodo, "Russia is building a new Napster — but for academic research" Washington Post July 13, 2018 Archived December 15, 2020, at the Wayback Machine
  6. Bodó, Balázs (2018-04-27). Library Genesis in Numbers: Mapping the Underground Flow of Knowledge. MIT Press. ISBN 9780262345705. Archived from the original on 2023-01-17. Retrieved 2020-11-01.
  7. Joe Karaganis (2018). Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education. MIT Press. p. 53. ISBN 978-0-262-34570-5. Archived from the original on 2023-01-17. Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  8. Bodó, Balázs (4 November 2014). "The Genesis of Library Genesis: The Birth of a Global Scholarly Shadow Library": 27. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2616631. S2CID 219352316. SSRN 2616631. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  9. "LibGen.lc Home Page". LibGen.lc. Library Genesis. Archived from the original on 2019-08-10. Retrieved 2019-07-28.
  10. "Reviving the LibGen community". reddit. 2021-02-07. Archived from the original on 2021-07-30. Retrieved 2021-07-30.
  11. "Court Orders Shutdown of LibGen, Bookfi and Sci-Hub - TorrentFreak". TorrentFreak. 2 November 2015. Archived from the original on 2020-05-04. Retrieved 2017-08-18.
  12. Schiermeier, Quirin (2015). "Pirate research-paper sites play hide-and-seek with publishers". Nature. doi:10.1038/nature.2015.18876. S2CID 188158277. Archived from the original on 2019-08-07. Retrieved 2015-12-06.
  13. "Sci-hub, bookfi and libgen resurface after being shut down". TorrentFreak. 21 November 2015. Archived from the original on 4 May 2020. Retrieved 7 January 2016.
  14. Mance, Henry; Correspondent, Media (2015-05-26). "Publishers win landmark case against ebook pirates". Financial Times. ISSN 0307-1766. Archived from the original on 2015-07-08. Retrieved 2015-10-05.
  15. Kamen, Matt (2015-05-27). "UK ISPs must block ebook pirate sites (Wired UK)". Wired UK. Archived from the original on 2019-08-07. Retrieved 2017-08-18.
  16. Rees, Marc (2019-03-30). "Les principaux FAI français doivent bloquer Sci-Hub et LibGen" [Main French ISPs must block Sci-Hub and LibGen]. Next INpact. Archived from the original on 2019-04-03. Retrieved 2020-01-16.
  17. "Vodafone Blocks LibGen Following Elsevier, Springer & Macmillan Injunction". TorrentFreak. 2018-08-08. Archived from the original on 2021-05-13. Retrieved 2020-01-16.
  18. "Decisions of the Committee - ΟΡΓΑΝΙΣΜΟΣ ΠΝΕΥΜΑΤΙΚΗΣ ΙΔΙΟΚΤΗΣΙΑΣ". opi.gr. Archived from the original on 2021-05-13. Retrieved 2019-12-04.
  19. Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni. "Delibera 178-18-CSP - Documento - AGCOM". www.agcom.it. Archived from the original on 2023-01-08. Retrieved 2023-01-08.
  20. "Les éditeurs scientifiques se liguent contre la piraterie". L'Echo (in French). 2019-10-16. Archived from the original on 2021-05-13. Retrieved 2020-01-14.
  21. "Denmark Blocks Sci-Hub Plus Streaming, Torrent & YouTube-Ripping Sites". TorrentFreak. 2019-09-26. Archived from the original on 2021-05-13. Retrieved 2019-10-09.
  22. "Sci-Hub "Pirate Bay of Science" Blocked in Russia Over Medical Studies * TorrentFreak". November 30, 2018. Archived from the original on 2018-12-05. Retrieved 2021-10-04.
  23. Himmelstein, Daniel S; Romero, Ariel Rodriguez; Levernier, Jacob G; Munro, Thomas Anthony; McLaughlin, Stephen Reid; Greshake Tzovaras, Bastian; Greene, Casey S (2018-03-01). "Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature". eLife. 7. doi:10.7554/eLife.32822. ISSN 2050-084X. PMC 5832410. PMID 29424689.
  24. "Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure a 'Pirate Bay of Science' Never Goes Down". Vice. Archived from the original on 13 June 2021. Retrieved 23 October 2020.
  25. "Meet the Guy Behind the LibGen Torrent Seeding Movement * TorrentFreak". Archived from the original on 13 May 2021. Retrieved 23 October 2020.
  26. "IPFS Free Library". freeread.org. Archived from the original on 2021-06-25. Retrieved 2021-07-05.
  27. "p2p Free Library: Help build humanity's free library on IPFS with Sci-Hub and Library Genesis". reddit. 14 October 2020. Archived from the original on 19 October 2020. Retrieved 23 October 2020.
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