<nettime> Shadow libraries in the Washington Post

[tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

What a pleasant thing to see this morning — a razor-sharp overview by 
Joe Karaganis and Balazs Bodo. In the Washington Post, no less.
Cheers,
T

< 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/07/13/russia-is-building-a-new-napster-but-for-academic-research/ 
>
Russia is building a new Napster -- but for academic research

By Joe Karaganis and Balazs Bodo

July 13 at 7:00 AM


What will future historians will see as the major Russian contribution 
to early 21st-century Internet culture? It might not be troll farms and 
other strategies for poisoning public conversation -- but rather, the 
democratization of access to scientific and scholarly knowledge. Over 
the last decade, Russian academics and activists have built free, 
remarkably comprehensive online archives of scholarly works. What 
Napster was to music, the Russian shadow libraries are to knowledge.
Much of the current attention to these libraries focuses on Sci-Hub, a 
huge online library created by Kazakhstan-based graduate student 
Aleksandra Elbakyan. Started in 2011, Sci-Hub has made freely available 
an archive of over 60 million articles, drawn primarily from paywalled 
databases of major scientific publishers. Its audience is massive and 
global. In 2017, the service provided nearly 200 million downloads. 
Because most scholars in high-income countries already have paid access 
to the major research databases through their university libraries, its 
main beneficiaries are students and faculty from middle- and low-income 
countries, who frequently do not.
Such underground flows of knowledge from more- to less-privileged 
universities are not new. But they used to depend on slower and 
less-reliable networks, such as developing-world students and faculty 
traveling to and from Western universities, bringing back photocopies 
and later hard drives full of scholarly work. Sci-Hub scaled this 
process up to meet the demand of an increasingly interconnected global 
scientific community, where the first barrier to participation was 
access to research.
Why Russia?

Academic copying and sharing has created shadow libraries all over the 
world. But only the Russian versions have grown into large-scale global 
libraries. This was not an accident. From the 1960s on, Russian 
intellectual life depended heavily on clandestine copying and 
distribution of texts -- on the "samizdat" networks that distributed 
uncensored literature and news. The fall of communism ended censorship. 
But it also left Russian readers, libraries and publishers impoverished, 
trading political constraints for economic ones.
The arrival of cheap scanners and computers fueled the growth of new 
self-organized libraries. By the second half of the 1990s, the Russian 
Internet -- RuNet -- was awash in book digitization projects run by 
intellectuals, activists and other bibliophiles. Texts migrated from 
print to digital and sometimes back again. Efforts to consolidate these 
projects also sprung up by the dozens. Such digital librarianship was 
the antithesis of official Soviet book culture, as it was free, 
bottom-up, democratic and uncensored. It also provided a modicum of 
cultural agency to Russian intellectuals amid the economic ruin of the 
1990s.
The big Russian shadow libraries emerged from this mix of clandestine 
librarianship, economic crisis, technological change and -- at the state 
level -- regulatory incapacity. By the early 2000s, these shadow 
librarians had digitized much of the highest-value Russian scientific 
and literary work. By the mid 2000s, the largest of these efforts had 
consolidated into an archive called Library Genesis, or LibGen.
LibGen equated survival with redundancy, and so made both its collection 
and its software available to others. Almost anyone could clone the 
library, and many did. By the late 2000s, the most prominent was the 
Gigapedia (later called Library.nu), which began to build a large 
English-language collection. When a copyright lawsuit by Western 
publishers took down the Gigapedia in 2012, its collection was 
re-assimilated into LibGen.
Sci-Hub was built around similar principles. When a user requested an 
article, Sci-Hub automatically downloaded that article from publisher 
databases, using borrowed faculty credentials. Sci-Hub then archived the 
article with LibGen, to fulfill any subsequent requests.
Now, Sci-Hub has its own archive, and LibGen serves as a backup. 
According to Elbakyan, the complete archive has been copied many times.
But what about the legal implications?

Much of this activity violates U.S. and international copyright law. In 
June 2017, a New York district court awarded $15 million to Elsevier, 
one of the handful of publishers that control most of the world's 
academic journals, in its lawsuit against Sci-Hub and LibGen. This 
hasn't stopped either service. But the legal pressure has forced Sci-Hub 
to periodically change hosting services and access methods. None of the 
LibGen administrators are named in the suit, but Elbakyan could face 
criminal charges if she travels to the United States.
All this has amplified academia's ongoing and intensifying debate about 
publishing ethics. Many academics regard their work as part of an open, 
cumulative and universal human project. Taxpayer dollars support a large 
amount of academic research, so much so that both the United States and 
European Union have open access requirements for publicly funded work -- 
although they have not yet fully figured out how to fund that 
requirement. Some Western academics have been boycotting publishers 
viewed as profiting unreasonably from their role as middlemen between 
academics and their own scholarship.
What comes next?

The U.S. and European open access mandates point to a future that looks 
a lot like a legal Sci-Hub: cheap, open and all you can eat. And this 
future appears to be getting closer. In mid-May, the largest Swedish 
university library consortium dropped its contract with Elsevier, 
objecting to the price of database access. Universities have taken 
similar actions in Germany and France. In practice, libraries have more 
leverage in these negotiations because of Sci-Hub, which offers 
researchers a back channel to Elsevier-published articles.
As with the music industry, it's possible that the publishers themselves 
will provide these better services and thereby marginalize their pirate 
competitors. As with music, publishers are learning that controlling the 
platform can be more lucrative than owning the content -- a shift that 
has underwritten a variety of publisher experiments with open or hybrid 
access models. It's also possible that the combination of legal pressure 
abroad and an increasingly repressive Russian state will break the 
online and personal networks that sustain the Sci-Hub/LibGen ecosystem.
In the meantime, the Russian shadow libraries will continue to support 
the global research community, shift the balance of power between 
libraries and publishers, and -- perhaps most important -- raise faculty 
and students' expectations about what meaningful access to knowledge 
entails, which publishers and universities will need to evolve to meet.
They will, in short, keep the pressure on to find legal ways to expand 
access for the tens of millions of new students and researchers entering 
global higher education.



Joe Karaganis (@jjkaraganis) is vice president at the American Assembly, 
a public policy institute at Columbia University, and editor of "Shadow 
Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education" (MIT Press, 
2018), downloadable free.
Balazs Bodo (@bodobalazs) is a senior research scientist at the 
Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam.
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