Library Genesis (Libgen) is a file-sharing based shadow library website for scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, 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 uploaded “from users”.
Controversy surrounds the copyright status of many works accessible through this website. For example, Libgen provides access to PDFs of content from Elsevier’s ScienceDirect web-portal. Some publishers like Elsevier have accused Library Genesis of providing pirate access to articles and books. In turn, others assert that academic publishers benefit from government-funded research, written by professors—many of whom are employed by public universities.
Background
Library Genesis grew rapidly by assimilating other libraries. By 2014, its catalog was more than twice the size of Library.nu with 1.2 million records. 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.
Started around 2008 by Russian scientists, it absorbed the contents of, and became the functional successor to, library.nu, which was shut down by legal action in 2012.
Legal issues
In 2015, Library Genesis became involved in a legal case with Elsevier, which accused it of pirating 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. Libgen is reported to be registered in both Russia and Amsterdam, making the appropriate jurisdiction for legal action unclear. Libgen is blocked by a number of ISPs in the United Kingdom, but such DNS-based blocks are claimed to do little to deter access. It is also blocked by ISPs in France, Germany, Greece, Belgium (which redirects to the Belgian Federal Police blockpage), and Russia. 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), but the site is accessible through alternate domains.
Usage, content and distribution
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.
In 2019 archivists and freedom of information activists launched a project to better seed and host LibGen’s data dumps. 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 digital library of content on Sci-Hub and Library Genesis using IPFS.