Yet there seems to be a widely shared (but certainly not universal ) consensus in the academic sector about the moral acceptability of such radical open access practices. Neither did those who use these services by downloading or uploading materials from / to them. The administrators of LibGen (and SciHub, for that matter) did not contest the legal assessment. Online service providers such as Facebook have also filtered links to the service. The domain names of the services were temporarily blocked in Russia, where these services were thought to be located, and by a number of ISPs in Europe. A Virginia district court ordered the domain names to be blocked in the US. The court ordered Alexandra Elbakyan, the operator of SciHub, and the anonymous operators of LibGen to pay damages of $15M, as well as confiscating the domain names. A New York court issued a default judgement against SciHub and Library Genesis, including their operators, finding all liable for willful copyright infringement. The legal status of LibGen is understood to be copyright infringement by rights holders, authors, as well as the users, and operators of the service. It also serves as a repository for scientific articles downloaded by the users of SciHub, another copyright infringing shadow library focused solely on journal articles, and a separate catalogue of literary work and comics. Its main focus is scholarly works: scientific monographs, edited volumes, and textbooks. All elements of the LG web service are freely available for anyone to download, including the webserver code, the most current copy of the database, or the works themselves. The digital versions of the books in LG are accessible via various centralized and peer-to-peer third-party services. At the time of writing in May, 2019, there are 2,363,587 records in its online catalogue, accessible through a simple web interface. Library Genesis (LG or LibGen) is a copyright infringing online collection of scholarly works: monographs, edited volumes, and textbooks.
#THE FOREST THE PIRATE DOWNLOAD CODE#
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All data and code is publicly available: Code and data repository: DOI: 10.5281/ZENODO.4012352 Raw Data repository: DOI: 10.21942/uva.12330959.įunding: The research received funding from the H2020 Research grant #710722 "OPENing UP new methods, indicators and tools for peer review, dissemination of research results, and impact measurement", and was carried out on the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of SURF Cooperative.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Received: JAccepted: OctoPublished: December 3, 2020Ĭopyright: © 2020 Bodó et al. PLoS ONE 15(12):Įditor: Sergi Lozano, Universitat de Barcelona, SPAIN We discuss these findings in the wider context of open access publishing, and point out that open access knowledge, if not met with proper knowledge absorption infrastructures, has limited usefulness in addressing knowledge access and production inequalities.Ĭitation: Bodó B, Antal D, Puha Z (2020) Can scholarly pirate libraries bridge the knowledge access gap? An empirical study on the structural conditions of book piracy in global and European academia. We found that while richer regions are the most intensive users of shadow libraries, poorer regions face structural limitations that prevent them from fully capitalizing on freely accessible knowledge. In particular, we test if lower income regions can compensate for the shortcomings in legal access infrastructures by more intensive use of illicit open resources. We reconstruct the social and economic factors that drive the global and European demand for illicit scholarly literature. This paper analyzes a set of weblogs of one of the Library Genesis mirrors, provided to us by one of the service’s administrators. Without the authorization of copyright holders, this shadow library hosts and makes more than 2 million scholarly publications, monographs, and textbooks available. Library Genesis is one of the oldest and largest illegal scholarly book collections online.