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63-860: Library Genesis ( LibGen ) is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to 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 's ScienceDirect web-portal. Publishers like Elsevier have accused Library Genesis of internet piracy . 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

126-426: A Moscow City Court ruling to comply with Elsevier's and Springer Nature 's complaints regarding intellectual property infringement. The site moved to another domain and is still available online as of 22 January 2022. On 7 March 2019, following a complaint by Elsevier and Springer Nature, a French court ordered French ISPs to block access to Sci-Hub and Library Genesis . However, the court order did not affect

189-435: A Reddit website to coordinate decentralized storage and delivery of Sci-Hub contents using BitTorrent technology. Elbakyan has released download request logs from Sci-Hub servers covering periods from 2011–2013, 2015–2016, and 2017. Studies of the 2017 Sci-Hub download logs indicated that: In February 2016, the website claimed to serve over 200,000 requests per day —an increase from an average of 80,000 per day before

252-454: A criminal offense . There are currently no settled cases determining whether it is permissible by academics to directly provide links to shadow libraries, though threats of legal action by academic publishers regarding such references have occurred in isolated incidents. Legal action against researchers remains uncommon. Although most academics are not penalized for distributing their published works independently and freely (therefore obviating

315-577: A concerted international movement, known as the Open Access movement, to make academic knowledge free or very inexpensive. The Open Access movement strives to establish both journals that are free to access (known as open access journals ) and free-to-access repositories of academic journal papers published elsewhere. However, many open access journals require academics to pay fees to be published in an open access journal, which disincentivizes academics from publishing in such journals. A third reason for

378-493: A copyright infringement lawsuit against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis in the Delhi High Court . The plaintiffs seek a dynamic injunction which means that any future domain name, IP address, or name-change by the respondents will not require the plaintiffs to return to court for an additional injunction. The court restricted the sites from uploading, publishing, or making any article available until 6 January 2021. In response to

441-561: A court case brought by Elsevier; Bahnhof , a large Swedish ISP, in return soft-blocked the Elsevier website. On 26 January 2023, the Sci-Hub .se domain name was reported to have been taken down, but the domain name was reinstated within a week after successful "ownership verification". In November 2018, Russia's Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media blocked Sci-Hub and its mirror websites after

504-565: A judge from the United States of America ordered the owner of LibGen to pay publishers $ 30M, but no one knows who runs it. LibGen is reported to be registered in both Russia and the Netherlands, 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

567-473: A preliminary injunction issued by an Indian court, and suspended in 2021 upload of new publications, except for some batch releases of content. In India, Sci-hub is being represented by Advocate Nilesh Jain. He was interviewed by Hannes Grassegger for the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung along with Alexandra Elbakyan. The High Court agreed on 6 January 2021 to wait before passing any interim order in

630-581: 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 . Shadow library Examples of shadow libraries include Anna's Archive , Library Genesis , Sci-Hub and Z-Library , which are popular book and academic shadow libraries and may be

693-631: A relatively low use of Sci-Hub in China. This was attributed to blocking of many Sci-Hub hosting sites by Cyberspace Administration of China and the existence of a Chinese twin of Sci-Hub, which is not accessible outside of China and is unknown to Western publishers. However, the situation in PR China changed in the next 3 years, and the data released by Elbakyan in February 2022 show the number of Sci-Hub downloads from within China having grown so large that, by then, it

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756-927: Is also blocked by ISPs in France , Germany , Greece , Italy , Belgium (which redirects to the Belgian Federal Police blockpage), and Russia (in November 2018). On March 23, 2024, the Dutch pirate site blocklist has been reported to now include Anna's Archive and Library Genesis, based on a request by BREIN , a local anti-piracy group. 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

819-480: Is helping to disseminate research that should be freely available in the first place. Library Genesis has roots in the illegal underground samizdat culture in the Soviet Union. As access to printing in the Soviet Union was strictly controlled and censored, dissident intellectuals would hand-copy and retype manuscripts for secret circulation. This was legalized under Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in

882-627: Is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research." At the time the website was hosted in St. Petersburg , Russia, where judgments made by American courts were not enforceable, and Sci-Hub did not defend the lawsuit. In June 2017, the court awarded Elsevier US$ 15 million in damages for copyright infringement by Sci-Hub and others in a default judgment . The judgment found that Sci-Hub used accounts of students and academic institutions to access articles through Elsevier's platform ScienceDirect . The judgment also granted

945-431: Is made available. According to one study from Cornell University, articles that are on Sci-Hub receive 1.72 times as many citations as articles from journals of similar quality that are not available on Sci-Hub. Content hosted by some shadow libraries may be hosted without the consent of the original owners of the material. This may make some shadow libraries illegal ; however, as researchers are not required to disclose

1008-596: Is served immediately. If the paper is not already in the repository, a wait screen appears while the site presents someone else's credentials on behalf of the user to a series of proxies until it finds one that has access to the paper, which is then presented to the user and stored in the repository. Until the end of 2014, Sci-Hub 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. The permanent storage made it possible to serve more users than

1071-465: The COVID-19 pandemic , a group of online archivists used Sci-Hub to create an archive of over 5,000 articles about coronaviruses . They admitted that making the archive openly accessible was illegal but considered it a moral imperative . Sci-Hub's interface is perceived by users as providing a superior user experience and convenience compared to the typical interfaces available to users who have access to

1134-685: The IP address , or through a .onion Tor Hidden Service. It is also accessible through a Telegram bot. In 2015, Elsevier filed a lawsuit against Sci-Hub, in Elsevier et al. v. Sci-Hub et al. , at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York . Library Genesis (LibGen) was also a defendant in the case, which may be based in either the Netherlands or in Russia. It

1197-574: The Royal Society of Chemistry , as well as open-access works, and distributes them without regard to publishers' copyrights. It requires neither payments, nor subscriptions, nor registrations. Users can access works from all sources with a unified interface by entering the DOI in the search bar on the main page or in the Sci-Hub URL (like some academic link resolvers), or by appending the Sci-Hub domain to

1260-526: The Society for Scholarly Publishing whose members are involved in legal action against Sci-Hub, credentials used by Sci-Hub to access paywalled articles are correlated to access of other information on university networks (such as cyber spying on universities ) and credential sales in black markets. Several articles have reported that Sci-Hub has penetrated the computer networks of more than 370 universities in 39 countries. These include more than 150 institutions in

1323-837: The University of Freiburg in Germany in 2010 that was working on a brain–computer interface . She then became interested in transhumanism and after attending a transhumanism conference in the United States, Elbakyan spent her remaining time in the country doing a research internship at Georgia Institute of Technology . She later returned to Kazakhstan, where she started research in a Kazakh university. According to Elbakyan, she experienced difficulty accessing scientific papers relevant to her research project. She began contributing to online forums dedicated to sharing research papers. In 2011, she developed Sci-Hub to automatically share papers. The site

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1386-457: The domain of a publisher's URL (like some academic proxies). Sci-Hub redirects requests for some gold open access works, identified as such beyond the metadata available in CrossRef and Unpaywall . Some requests require the user to enter a CAPTCHA . Papers can also be accessed using a bot in the instant messaging service Telegram . If the paper is in the repository already, the request

1449-425: The scientific , academic, and publishing communities for providing access to knowledge generated by the scientific community, which is usually funded by taxpayers (government grants) and with zero royalties paid to the authors. Publishers have criticized it for violating copyright, reducing the revenue of publishers, and potentially being linked to activities compromising universities' network security , though

1512-602: The "sci-hub.org" domain was blocked in 2015. Server log data gathered from September 2015 to February 2016 and released by Elbakyan in 2016 revealed some usage information. A large amount of Sci-Hub's user activity came from American and European university campuses, and when adjusted for population, usage of Sci-Hub was high for developed countries . However, a large proportion of download requests came from developing countries such as Iran, China, India, Russia, Brazil, and Egypt. User activity covered all branches of science, engineering, medicine, and humanities. In March 2017,

1575-525: 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

1638-485: The ACS was granted a default judgment , and a permanent injunction was granted against all parties in active concert or participation with Sci-Hub that has notice of the injunction, "including any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries", to cease facilitating access to the service. On 23 November 2017, four Sci-Hub domains had been rendered inactive by

1701-643: The Sci-Hub website reported that the cumulative number of downloads from the database exceeded one billion, that the average number of downloads per day was 300,000–600,000, and that the database continued its expansion into the pre-digital age, particularly into journal articles published prior to 1980. Among achievements in 2019, Sci-Hub reported the publication of about 15,000 letters by Charles Darwin , most of which were not available free of charge, although their copyrights had expired over 100 years previously. In 2019, Elbakyan also reported plans to allow access to Supplemental Information of journal articles in addition to

1764-548: The U.S., more than 30 in Canada, 39 in the UK, and more than 10 in Sweden. The universities in the UK include Cambridge , Oxford , Imperial , and King's College London . The Sci-Hub website provides access to articles from almost all academic publishers , including Elsevier, Springer, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers , American Chemical Society, Wiley Blackwell , and

1827-556: The academic network Renater , through which most French academic access to Sci-Hub presumably goes. Following the lawsuit by Elsevier in March 2019 in France, Elsevier, Springer , John Wiley , and Cambridge University Press filed a complaint against Proximus , VOO , Brutélé , and Telenet to block access to Sci-Hub and LibGen. The publishers claimed to represent more than half of the scientific publishing sector and indicated that over 90% of

1890-463: 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 ordered LibGen to shut down and to suspend use of the domain name (libgen.org), but the site is accessible through alternate domains. On September 26th, 2024,

1953-552: The allegation was denied by Elbakyan. The site's operation is financed by user donations. The PHP code, setup of the Linux web servers, and maintenance are all done by Elbakyan herself to avoid risk of moles or a broken team compromising the service. Over the years, various URL addresses and direct IP addresses have been used for Sci-Hub, as dozens of domain names have been confiscated by various legal authorities. Sci-Hub obtains paywalled articles using leaked credentials. The source of

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2016-531: The alleged security threat that Sci-Hub poses to institutions to encourage educational institutions to block its use. Elbakyan responded to the case in an interview by accusing Elsevier of violating the right to science and culture under Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . She later wrote a letter to the court about the case describing her reasons for creating Sci-Hub, in which she stated, "Payment of 32 dollars [for each download]

2079-568: The case until they hear representations from scientists, researchers, and students. A hearing was scheduled for 16 December 2021. A key component of Sci-Hub's legal defence is that it provides educational resources to researchers and thus falls under a fair dealing exception in India's copyright law. This defence has previously been used by educational institutions to justify the reproduction of copyrighted materials for use by low-income students. A number of Indian academics offered support to Sci-Hub after

2142-498: The contents on the sites infringed copyright laws ; they won the lawsuit. Since then, the two sites have been blocked by those ISPs ; visitors are redirected to a stop page by Belgian Federal Police instead, citing illegality of the site's content under Belgian legislation. The European Commission included Sci-Hub in its "Piracy Watch List". In December 2020, Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society filed

2205-470: The court order and its CloudFlare account was terminated. Since 2018, the White House Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has cited Sci-Hub as one of the most flagrant " notorious market " sites in the world. On 8 January 2021, Twitter suspended Sci-Hub's account citing "counterfeit content" as the reason. In October 2018, Swedish ISPs were forced to block access to Sci-Hub after

2268-418: The credentials used by Sci-Hub is unclear. Some appear to have been donated, some were apparently sold before going to Sci-Hub, and some appear to have been obtained via phishing and were then used by Sci-Hub. Elbakyan denied personally sending any phishing emails and said, "The exact source of the passwords was never personally important to me." According to The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog established by

2331-423: The cybersecurity threat posed by Sci-Hub may have been exaggerated by publishers. Elbakyan questioned the morality of the publishers' business and the legality of their methods in regards to the right to science and culture under Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights , while maintaining that Sci-Hub should be "perfectly legal". Many Sci-Hub users see Sci-Hub as a moral imperative , and if

2394-630: 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 , 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. 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. In 2020,

2457-615: The enormous size of its collection; a 2018 study estimated that Sci-Hub provided access to most of the scholarly publications with issued DOI numbers. On 15 July 2022, Sci-Hub reported that its collection comprised 88,343,822 files. Since December 2020, the site has paused uploads due to legal troubles . Sci-Hub and Elbakyan were sued twice for copyright infringement in the United States, in 2015 and 2017, and lost both cases by default , leading to loss of some of its Internet domain names . The site has cycled through different domain names since then. Sci-Hub has been praised by some in

2520-430: The establishment of shadow libraries is the tacit endorsement by many academics of such efforts. Academics are rarely compensated by publishers for their work, regardless of whether their work is published in an open access journal or a conventionally priced journal. Thus, there is now little incentive for academics to disavow shadow libraries. Furthermore, shadow libraries greatly increase the impact of academics whose work

2583-497: The factors that reduced the apparent value of the subscriptions to toll access resources. Journal Nature reported in 2022 that China had the largest number of downloads (25 million downloads in January of 2022 alone), followed by the United States (10 million) and France (6 million). A 2023 study has found that more than 50% of academic researchers use websites like Sci-Hub to avoid paywalls. Those who do not use Sci-Hub reported

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2646-556: The injunction, which led to the loss of the original sci-hub.org domain. In June 2017, the American Chemical Society (ACS) filed a lawsuit against Sci-Hub in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia , alleging copyright and trademark infringement; it sought judgment US$ 4.8 million from Sci-Hub in damages, and Internet service provider blocking of the Sci-Hub website. On 6 November 2017,

2709-673: The lack of knowledge about the site as the main reason for not using it. Another study, also published in 2023, concluded that Sci-Hub is widely used by students and faculty even at major research universities in developed countries, because Sci-Hub has a larger collection of research articles than any single library in the world and because Sci-Hub provides an easier-to-use interface to retrieve these articles than legal academic libraries. Aside from academic researchers, another large niche of Sci-Hub users are medical professionals outside of university hospitals, who usually do not have access to original publications in medical journals. The same study found

2772-457: The largest public libraries for books and literature. One of the goals of shadow libraries is to more readily disseminate academic content, especially papers from academic journals. Academic literature has become increasingly expensive, as costs to access information created by scholars have risen dramatically in recent years, especially the cost of books. The term serials crisis has emerged to describe this ongoing trend. There has also been

2835-748: The lawsuit was filed. Multiple petitions were filed by scholars in India supporting Sci-Hub in the lawsuit. Another line of defence pursued by Elbakyan and her supporters was that journal publishers did not pay to the authors for copyright transfer, as Indian copyright law requires, and therefore the publishers did not own the copyrights on these articles. However, the Indian court rejected these arguments in November of 2022 and scheduled full hearing for July 2023. In response, Sci-Hub legal representatives announced that they will pursue other, perhaps more promising, legal strategies. In February 2021, Elsevier and Springer Nature obtained an injunction on TalkTalk to block

2898-484: The lawsuit, as well as to Elbakyan's claim that the FBI had requested data from her Apple account, Reddit users on the subreddit r/DataHoarder organized to download and seed backups of the articles on Sci-Hub, with the intention of creating a decentralized and uncensorable version of the site. In order to have a better chance of winning a lawsuit presented against her and Sci-Hub by Elsevier in India, Elbakyan complied with

2961-436: The main texts, which are already available. A multivariable regression study of Sci-Hub downloads in 2018 on/near university campuses (which subscribe to some, but not all, journals) and in the areas lacking PhD-granting institutions, showed that the use of Sci-Hub is driven mostly by necessity (i.e. lack of subscriptions to the needed journals) rather than by convenience (easier search and access via Sci-Hub interface). However,

3024-432: The means by which they access academic material, it is difficult to monitor the use of illegally accessed academic papers. Not all authors agree with trying to compromise access to shadow libraries. The legality of directing individuals to shadow libraries is broadly undetermined. There is currently no consensus among legal authorities in the United States and Europe as to what extent advertising shadow libraries constitutes

3087-510: The need for shadow libraries in the first place), there are reports of academic publishers threatening such academics with legal action. Shadow libraries (or their content databases) make use of BitTorrent (mainly for database dumps), dark web and IPFS technologies to increase their resilience or distribute loads. In the case of Anna's Archive , the software is developed and made accessible as open source software , enabling code development by any volunteer and mirrors or forks , with

3150-510: The operation of Sci-Hub contradicts the law, it is the law that should be changed rather than banning Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub was created by Alexandra Elbakyan , who was born in Kazakhstan in 1988. Elbakyan earned her undergraduate degree at Kazakh National Technical University studying information technology, then worked for a year for a computer security firm in Moscow, then joined a research team at

3213-758: The original Sci-Hub websites and excluded replica or "mirror" sites. It therefore did not count downloads from places where the original domain is banned (e.g. the UK). Furthermore. the use of VPN can skew some results (e.g. possibly India). Sci-Hub effectively does academic archiving outside the bounds of contemporary copyright law , and, unlike Web archiving initiatives such as the Internet Archive , also provides access to academic works that do not have an open access license. There are data dumps of papers available on Sci-Hub. Researchers have also made their own mirrored repositories of Sci-Hub. Additionally, in response to

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3276-399: The previous system of deleting the cached content after 6 hours. Since 2015, Sci-Hub uses its own storage for the same purpose. As of 2017, Sci-Hub was continuing to redirect requests for electronic books to LibGen. After the site faced increased legal pressure in 2021, archivists initiated a rescue mission to secure enduring access to the website and its contents. They organized on

3339-415: 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. In 2015, Library Genesis became involved in a legal case with Elsevier , which accused it of copyright infringement and granting free access to articles and books. In response,

3402-472: The sci-hub.se domain as a result of a ruling handed down by a UK court. In March 2021, City of London police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit issued a warning to students and universities against accessing the website and to have the website blocked by universities with allegations that the website could steal credentials, mainly to download content from publishers and cause users to "inadvertently download potentially dangerous content" when visited. However,

3465-410: The site claiming that "if we get taken down we'll just pop right up elsewhere, since all our code and data is fully open source". Sci-Hub Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers , regardless of copyright , by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways. Unlike Library Genesis , it does not provide access to books. Sci-Hub

3528-449: The study used a definition of "necessity" that included avoiding inconveniences such as multi-factor authentication. A 2023 study of Sci-Hub usage in Spain instead found that a plurality of surveyed researchers used Sci-Hub for "quick and easy access". In 2019, in the context of the big deal cancellations by several library systems in the world, the wide usage of Sci-Hub was credited as one of

3591-660: The study's methods and conclusions were disputed by Phil Davis in a Scholarly Kitchen article. In a 2021 study conducted by the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies , and Banaras Hindu University on the use of Sci-Hub in India, 13,144,241 out of 150,575,861 download requests in 2017 were found to have come from Indian IP addresses. Of the research papers downloaded in India, 1,050,62, or 18.46%, of these are already available in some form of open access. Indian users requested an average of 39,952 downloads per day from Sci-Hub in 2017. A 2018 study found

3654-418: The website had 62 million papers in its collection, which were found to include 85% of the articles published in paywalled scholarly journals. Although only 69% of all published articles were in the database in March 2017, it has been estimated, based on scholarly citations from articles published between 2015 and July 2017, that at least 96% of requests for paywalled articles are successful. On 27 July 2020,

3717-525: The younger researchers and medical professionals use Sci-Hub more frequently than their older colleagues. A 2016 analysis of 28 million requests to Sci-Hub published in Science with the title Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone shows a map of Sci-Hub users with dots all over the world. A 2020 study by researchers from 4 countries on 3 continents found that articles downloaded from Sci-Hub were cited 1.72 times more than papers not downloaded from Sci-Hub;

3780-427: Was founded in Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls (see Serials crisis ). The site is extensively used worldwide. In September 2019, the site's operator(s) said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. In addition to its intensive use, Sci-Hub stands out among other shadow libraries because of its easy use/reliability and because of

3843-574: Was launched on September 5, 2011. In May 2021, Sci-Hub users collaborated to preserve the website's data, anticipating that the site may go offline. In September 2021, the site celebrated the tenth anniversary of its launch date by uploading on that single day over 2.3 million articles to its database. Sci-Hub has cycled through domain names, some of which have been blocked by domain registry operators . Sci-Hub remained reachable via alternative domains such as .io , then .cc , and .bz . Sci-Hub has also been accessible at times by directly entering

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3906-490: Was more than for any other country. An analysis of locational data from January 2022 indicated that researchers worldwide are accessing papers using Sci-Hub. China, which topped the chart, had more than 25 million downloads in a month. The U.S. was the second largest ( c.  38% of PRC downloads), and France the third largest (24% of the U.S.). India had the second-highest number of individual users but only ranked fifth in downloads. This study only assessed downloads from

3969-481: Was the largest copyright infringement case that had been filed in the U.S., or in the world, at the time. Elsevier alleged that Sci-Hub violated copyright law and induced others to do so, and it alleged violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as inducements to violate that law. Elsevier asked for monetary damages and an injunction to stop the sharing of the papers. Elsevier has used accusations over

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