By Nkrita - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Sci-Hub and Libgen descend from a Soviet tradition of smuggled science

by · Boing Boing

Today's enormous shadow libraries — Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, and the rest — trace back to Soviet samizdat, the underground practice of typing forbidden books onto carbon paper and passing the copies hand to hand. Russian scholars who grew up inside that culture started digitizing texts in the 1990s, and the through-line from clandestine typewriters to today's gigantic online archives is direct.

Sarah Laskow's Atlas Obscura piece on the pirate library underground traces a parade of these projects — Gigapedia, Kolkhoz, Librusec, Libgen, Sci-Hub — each growing to gigantic proportions and then being broken up or sued into a new domain name.

Alexandra Elbakyan, a neuroscientist from Kazakhstan, built Sci-Hub by rigging up a system that jumps journal paywalls on demand. A user requests an article; Sci-Hub checks the Libgen database first, and if the paper isn't already cached, it uses donated university passwords to fetch a copy, hand it over, and add it to the permanent archive. Elsevier sued in 2015, claiming millions in lost profits, but the site is growing.

Researcher Balázs Bodó found that the heaviest downloaders are in Russia, Indonesia, and the United States. Adjusted for population, the busiest users live in former Eastern Bloc countries. Two-thirds of the downloaded books have no Kindle edition. which suggests the libraries are filling a gap that the commercial market doesn't serve.

Libgen, alongside its high-brow academic stash, also keeps a vast pile of pirated comic books.

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