Early predecessors to shadow libraries were informal collections of unauthorized digital copies of books, scholarly literature, and other textual media, often shared with small groups via mailing lists, forums, or social media websites.: 1 Online communities of scientists also collaborated to share paywalled literature among themselves.
Some of these early collections later became shadow libraries as they attracted volunteer librarians who catalogued the archives' contents. Early academic shadow libraries in the 2000s included Textz.org, Monoskop, and Gigapedia (later Library.nu). Gigapedia focused more on academic texts than other shadow libraries, which mainly contained literature.: 26–27 Around 2006 or 2007, it incorporated the files amassed by the Kolkhoz collectors,: 37 and had become the largest shadow library by 2010.: 26–27 Gigapedia, by then renamed to Library.nu, was shut down in 2012 through a lawsuit from a coalition of seventeen publishing companies including HarperCollins, Oxford University Press, and MacMillan.: 26–27
Library Genesis (also known as LibGen) was founded in approximately 2007 or 2008 by a group of Russian scientists, who began by organizing a collection of Russian science and technology texts made available on a torrent site, aggregated from sources including the Kolkhoz collection and lib.ru.: 27–28, 38 In 2011, LibGen absorbed the Library.nu collection, keeping it accessible even as Library.nu was forced to shut down. At the time, LibGen was unique in its focus on its open library infrastructure, prioritizing the free sharing of its collection, catalog, and source code to encourage many others to increase shadow libraries' collective resiliency by mirroring and forking the project.: 27–28
LibGen's operators have described the site's mission as enabling access to information for poor people and opposing the gating of knowledge by elite academic institutions, with one administrator writing "the target groups for LibGen are poors: Africa, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, China, Russia and post-USSR etc., and on a separate note, people who do not belong to academia. If you are not at a university, you can't access anything or at least your access will be so much troubled that you won't be able to progress at all.": 28 Alexandra Elbakyan, the creator of Sci-Hub, has justified the site by arguing that the lack of open access to scholarship violates the human right to science and culture, captured in Article 27 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits." Elbakyan has also argued that "Any law against knowledge is fundamentally unjust". American activist Aaron Swartz captured the motivations of many shadow libraries in his 2008 Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,: 28–29 writing:
Shadow libraries have also cited the increasing cost of academic literature and books, also termed the "serials crisis".
Shadow libraries often host or link to copyrighted material without the consent of copyright holders, making them illegal or dubiously legal in many countries. Such libraries are also described as pirate libraries.: 4 Many shadow libraries maintain bibliographic catalogs separate from the hosting of files themselves. This is both an organizational convenience and a protection against legal challenges, since the law is often ambiguous on the distinction between hosting and indexing copyrighted content. However, several shadow library catalogs have been the target of injunctions and takedown threats.: 25–26
The legality of directing individuals to shadow libraries is undetermined. While there are legal theories that linking to copyright infringing material hosted by shadow libraries could constitute vicarious or contributory copyright infringement, there have been no cases brought with these theories. In 2019, Elsevier threatened legal action against Citationsy, the developer of a bibliography management tool, for publishing a blog post directing readers to Sci-Hub and Citationsy removed the link.
Although most academics are not penalized for distributing their own published works for free, academic publishers have threatened scientists for sharing or republishing their work.
Some publishers have accused shadow libraries including Sci-Hub of illegally obtaining login credentials to academic databases, though Sci-Hub says the credentials are voluntarily donated.
Some academics have tacitly or explicitly endorsed shadow library efforts, with many viewing them as morally acceptable acts of civil disobedience against the abusive business models of academic publishers. Furthermore, shadow libraries may increase the impact of academics whose work is made available. According to one study from Cornell University, articles that are available on Sci-Hub receive 1.72 times as many citations as articles from journals of similar quality that are not available on Sci-Hub.
Non-academic writers have been more vocally opposed to shadow libraries.
However, some authors and writers' organizations have opposed such efforts. British novelist Alison Rumfitt wrote in Dazed that she was not celebrating the site's takedown, and that "the hunger to read is something to be encouraged, something which, in my opinion, is a societal good; even as publishing grows ever more overtly capitalist and monopolised, reading still thrives, and piracy allows it to take place despite borders and Digital Rights Management. Not everyone has access to a library, and not every library in the world is well-stocked." Dave Hansen, executive director of the Authors Alliance nonprofit, expressed that students and researchers would be negatively impacted by attempts to shut down shadow libraries, and expressed that such projects were "a kind of symptom of how broken the system is, particularly when you’re looking at access to scientific articles".
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