Table Of ContentShadow Libraries
Shadow Libraries
Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education
Edited by Joe Karaganis
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
International Development Research Centre
Ottawa • Cairo • Montevideo •Nairobi •New Delhi
The American Assembly at Columbia University
New York
© 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0)
International License.
A copublication with
International Development Research Centre
PO Box 8500
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Canada
www.idrc.ca/ [email protected]
and
The American Assembly at Columbia University
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The research presented in this publication was carried out with the financial assistance of Cana-
da’s International Development Research Centre. The views expressed herein do not necessarily
represent those of IDRC or its Board of Governors.
This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Karaganis, Joe, editor.
Title: Shadow libraries : access to educational materials in global higher education / edited by
Joe Karaganis.
Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press ; Ottawa, ON : International Development
Research Centre, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017033629 | ISBN 9780262535014 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Scholarly publishing--Economic aspects--Developing countries. | Scholarly
electronic publishing--Developing countries. | Piracy (Copyright)--Developing countries. |
Intellectual property infringement--Economic aspects--Developing countries. | Copyright--
Electronic information resources--Developing countries. | Photocopying--Developing
countries. | Open access publishing--Developing countries. | Communication in learning
and scholarship--Technological innovations--Developing countries. | Education,
Higher--Developing countries.
Classification: LCC Z286.S37 S48 2018 | DDC 070.5--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.
gov/2017033629
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
1 Introduction: Access from Above, Access from Below 1
Joe Karaganis
2 The Genesis of Library Genesis: The Birth of a Global Scholarly Shadow Library 25
Balázs Bodó
3 Library Genesis in Numbers: Mapping the Underground Flow of Knowledge 53
Balázs Bodó
4 Argentina: A Student-Made Ecosystem in an Era of State Retreat 79
Evelin Heidel
5 Access to Learning Resources in Post-apartheid South Africa 107
Eve Gray and Laura Czerniewicz
6 Poland: Where the State Ends, the Hamster Begins 159
Mirosław Filiciak and Alek Tarkowski
7 India: The Knowledge Thief 183
Lawrence Liang
8 Brazil: The Copy Shop and the Cloud 223
Pedro Mizukami and Jhessica Reia
9 Coda: Uruguay 273
Jorge Gemetto and Mariana Fossatti
Contributors 279
Index 283
1 Introduction: Access from Above, Access from Below
Joe Karaganis
I n t r o d u c t i o n
Joe Karaganis
In 2009, a Russian neuroscience student named Aleksandra Elbakyan started a master’s
thesis on biometric scanning at Kazakhstan University. Like many students and aca-
demics outside U.S. and European universities, Elbakyan had little access to research
on her topic: her university didn’t subscribe to the international databases that contain
most of the world’s scientific articles. Like many scholars in similar positions, she relied
on material shared by colleagues based at or visiting universities that do provide access.
Finding articles under such circumstances was haphazard and slow. For the most part,
Elbakyan obtained them through personal contacts or professional networks that tried
to match individual requests for articles with copies.
Unauthorized digital copies of books and articles began to be aggregated into online
collections in the early 2000s. In most cases, these collections were small—personal
collections of scanned materials shared via listservs and social media accounts. In a
few cases, these collections grew into larger, curated archives—the Russian-language
Library Genesis site (usually called LibGen), the Spanish-language Hansi library, and
the social theory archive Aaaaarg (yes, the pirate sound) were early examples. Together,
these methods of collecting and sharing enabled a slow osmosis of scholarly literature
from more privileged to less privileged students, researchers, and universities. Elbakyan
found a way to accelerate the process.
In 2011, Elbakyan launched Sci-Hub, a search and download service for journal
articles. Sci-Hub was connected to LibGen, which by then had grown into a mostly
academic, mostly unauthorized archive of over half a million books and articles. By
most accounts, Elbakyan’s innovation was to mobilize university colleagues to share
not individual articles, but “virtual private network” credentials for campus intranets
in Western universities, which enabled access to the major journal databases.
The core method was simple but ingenious. On Sci-Hub, a search for an article trig-
gered a search of LibGen. If the article wasn’t found in LibGen, Sci-Hub searched the
major journal databases using the acquired credentials. When the user downloaded
2 Joe Karaganis
a copy, Sci-Hub simultaneously uploaded a copy to LibGen, ensuring that the next
request for the document could be met from within the collection. By 2016, Sci-
Hub/LibGen had grown to around fifty million articles. Over a six-month period in
2015–2016, it had over 28 million downloads (Bohannon 2016).
Because Sci-Hub circumvented the paywalls on which much of the scientific pub-
lishing world was built, the major publishers were eager to shut it down. In late 2015,
Elsevier, whose ScienceDirect database was a major source for Sci-Hub, obtained an
injunction in a U.S. court targeting the service, LibGen, several other unauthorized
book archives, and Elbakyan personally—one of the only publicly identified indi-
viduals in this world of shadow libraries. In early 2017, the outcome was still uncer-
tain: Sci-Hub had been forced to switch domains twice and had disabled its direct
search capabilities. The LibGen site had been up and down several times in the pre-
ceding year. Although the Russian services that hosted Sci-Hub and LibGen remain
relatively insulated from U.S. injunctions, the sites depend on other parts of the
Internet that are more vulnerable to legal pressure—domain name registrars, search
engines, and Internet service providers especially. When these companies comply with
injunctions, they can make life difficult, though rarely impossible, for the targeted
services.
As everyone from Elbakyan to Elsevier knew, however, Sci-Hub’s importance was not
its permanence as a service but its status as a proof of concept. Its core archive of fifty
million articles was freely available and its basic search and archive features easily rep-
licated. Elbakyan herself estimated that the full archive has been copied many times,
moving well beyond the network of Russian academics and hackers who formed the
core community behind LibGen and many of the other top-level archives. Although
Elbakyan made no significant effort to hide her identity and may face arrest on charges
of copyright infringement, the larger network of pirate archivists behind the other ser-
vices has kept a much lower profile.
The Sci-Hub story made headlines as the authors and researchers involved in this
book were wrapping up our study of this rapidly changing knowledge ecosystem.
Shadow Libraries explores this reorganization of the flow of educational and research
materials as they pass from authors to publishers and libraries, to students and research-
ers, and from comparatively rich universities to poorer ones.
From the top down, Shadow Libraries explores the institutions that shape the provi-
sion of these materials, from the formal sector of universities and publishers to the
broadly informal ones organized by faculty, copy shops, student unions, and students
themselves. It looks at the history of policy battles over access to education in the
post–World War II era and at the narrower versions that have played out in relation to
