Library Genesis (Libgen) is a

file-sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include ...

based

shadow library Shadow libraries are online databases of readily available content that is normally obscured or otherwise not readily accessible. Such content may be inaccessible for a number of reasons, including the use of paywalls, copyright controls, or othe ...

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. 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". Libgen provides access to copyrighted works, such as PDFs of content from

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...

's ScienceDirect web-portal. Publishers like Elsevier have accused Library Genesis of

internet piracy Online piracy or software piracy is the practice of downloading and distributing copyrighted works digitally without permission, such as music or software. The principle behind piracy has predated the creation of the Internet, but its online popul ...

. 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.

History

Library Genesis has roots in the illegal underground ''

samizdat Samizdat (russian: самиздат, lit=self-publishing, links=no) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the document ...

'' culture in the Soviet Union. 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. It subsequently absorbed the contents of, and became the functional successor to,

library.nu Library.nu, previously called ebooksclub.org from 2004 to 2007 and gigapedia.com from 2007 to 2010, was a popular linking website. It was accused of copyright infringement and was shut down by court order on February 15, 2012. According to the t ...

, which was shut down by legal action in 2012. By 2014, its catalog was more than twice the size of library.nu with 1.2 million records. 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. In 2020, the project was forked under an alternate domain, "libgen.fun", due to internal conflict within the project. As a result, databases are being maintained independently and content differs between libgen.fun and other Libgen domains.

Legal issues

Litigation

In 2015, Library Genesis became involved in a legal case with

, which accused it of

copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...

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. In late October 2015, the

District Court for the Southern District of New York The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (in case citations, S.D.N.Y.) is a United States district court, federal trial court whose geographic jurisdiction encompasses eight counties of New York (state), New York ...

ordered Libgen to shut down and to suspend use of the domain name (libgen.org), but the site is accessible through alternate domains.

Hosting country

Libgen is reported to be registered in both Russia and The Netherlands, making the appropriate jurisdiction for legal action unclear.

Blocks

Libgen is blocked by a number of

ISPs An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

in the United Kingdom, but such

DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to ...

-based blocks are claimed to do little to deter access. It is also blocked by ISPs in

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

Greece Greece,, or , romanized: ', officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the southern tip of the Balkans, and is located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Greece shares land borders ...

Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...

(which redirects to the Belgian Federal Police blockpage), and Russia (in November of 2018).

Usage

Until the end of 2014, Sci-Hub, which provides free access to millions of

research papers Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publ ...

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. In 2019 archivists and freedom of information activists launched a project to better

seed A seed is an embryonic plant enclosed in a protective outer covering, along with a food reserve. The formation of the seed is a part of the process of reproduction in seed plants, the spermatophytes, including the gymnosperm and angiospe ...

and host LibGen's

data dump A database dump contains a record of the table structure and/or the data from a database and is usually in the form of a list of SQL statements ("SQL dump"). A database dump is most often used for backing up a database so that its contents can b ...

s. 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". In 2020, the project launched a

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer ...

digital library A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital ...

of content on Sci-Hub and Library Genesis using

IPFS The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol, hypermedia and file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. IPFS uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file in a global namespac ...

Explanatory notes

References

External links

List of mirrors and gateways
including their status. * {{Portal bar, 1980s, Books, Education Search engine software File sharing communities I2P Intellectual property activism Book websites BitTorrent websites Russian digital libraries Shadow libraries