SHADOW LIBRARY

Publisher's role 

• Scientists and researchers are funded by the government or foundations to carry out research and experiments.
• They share their findings and knowledge with broader society through journals owned by large publishers.
• Authors do not receive any compensation for publishing their work in journals.
• They voluntarily submit their articles to these publishers to get them peer-reviewed.
• These reviewers are unsung heroes who go through pre-print scientific articles for free and share their comments.

• In the pre-digital era, publishers had to incur the cost of printing, packaging and posting copies of the journal to subscribers in various parts of the world.
• Their primary readers were students and scholars in universities, which received the journals and stacked them in their libraries for access.

Open access movement

• The Internet age that began in the early nineties saw an explosion of interest in the concept of open access in academic circles.

• The new millennium also brought in an era where electronic data could be made available almost instantly everywhere.
• The digital age brought down the cost of publishing and distribution for publishers.

BOAI

• This moment was rightly captured by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).
• The initiative arose from a conference convened by the Open Society Institute in Budapest Hungary.
• BOAI is a declaration of principles relating to the open access movement.
• The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge.

Internet 

Wikipedia 

Authors pay model 

• Just two years after the open access movement began, several universities in the U.S. threatened to cancel subscriptions to academic journals in protest at what they called exorbitantly pricing.
• One economic decision that came out of this tussle was the "author pay" model, which meant that the author had to pay the journal for publishing their article online.

The making of shadow libraries

• while publishers were tinkering with their business model to find a profitable way forward, a database was slowly being built in post-Soviet land with the help of hundreds of thousands of uncoordinated contributions.
• This massive network came to be called Library Genesis (LibGen) in 2008 and due to its complex history, it is unclear who the actual owner of the site is.
• The size of the LibGen Catalogue grew from nearly 34, 000 to nearly 1.2 million records.
• This has nearly tripled in the last seven years to roughly 3.2 million records.
• Sci-Hub is another shadow library that offers scientific journals and papers for free to users.
• Both SciHub and LibGen share copyrighted books and articles for free and the duo are known to operate around the Russian-Speaking milieu.
• These thrive in Russia due to lax copyright law, weak IP protection rules and early access to modern computers in the country.
• This part of the world had early access to desktops and databases helped them to develop large-scale digital text archives.

Information for all 

• These shadow libraries have become a thorn in the flesh for large publishers who wield control over nearly half of all scientific literature and make a hefty profit from selling journals to university libraries.

• This is one of the major reasons why digital piracy is an ever-raging controversy in academic circles as people confront questions relating to the ethics of privacy while wrangling with legal publishing models which underpay contributors and depend heavily on unpaid volunteers.

Sci-Hub

• A case in point is Sci-Hub's battle to make information free for all.
• Founded by Alexandra Elbakyan, a scholar and programmer, the site lets users download scientific papers and academic literature.
• The resources available in the library are pay-walled content taken from prominent journals.
  This database has been in the cross-hairs of large publishing houses like Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society (ACS).
• In 2017, in the U.S. a New York district court awarded Elsevier $15 million in damages after ruling that Sci-Hub violated U.S. copyright law.

The lawsuit in Delhi High Court

• In December 2020, Elsevier, ACS and Willey filed a lawsuit against Sci-Hub in the Delhi High Court and named Elbakyan as a defendant.
• They aim to compel Indian ISPs to block both Sci-Hub and LibGen.
• Private websites like Sci-Hub threaten the integrity of the scientific record and the safety of university and personal student data.
• They compromise the security of libraries and higher education institutions to gain unauthorised access to scientific databases and other proprietary intellectual property and illegally harvest journal articles and e-books.

Indian users 

• A chart on the Sci-Hub site showed that India was one of the top five countries in terms of downloaded articles per month, with over two million downloads to its name at the last count though this may not be accurate due to VPN and robot use.
• Users in China have downloaded over 30 million copies a month at the last count.

• Elsevier countered by stating it was helping the research community in its way.

• The Netherlands-based publisher is firm on taking the legal route to regulate shadow libraries, pointing out that India does the same for its pirated movies.
• They applied to the Delhi high court to request that Indian internet service provides block access to the pirate websites Sci-Hub and LibGen within the country.

An Author's perspective

• The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts (HarperCollins India, 2019).
• He admitted that writing his book would not have been possible without LibGen, as they were many books he could not afford.
• He further added in his note that, "doing scholarly work outside the gated precincts of a university is like trying to swim with one arm and one leg".
• Bhatia's science fiction novel, The Wall was available for download on Z-Library.
• He pointed out that fiction writers need to show rising sales numbers for more publishing opportunities, but scientists and researchers rely on factors such as citations and peer reviews.

Legal perspective

• Jurisdictions and internet service providers treated movie and television privacy with more seriousness than book privacy, depending on the location.
• For now, only website access through one of the main URLs to Z-Library is blocked, rather than a total shutdown of the shadow library.

Court filing

• According to a court filing from September 7, Taxmann Publications has also asked the court to block an alternate link allegedly created by Z-library.
• As of September 1, Z-Library boasted a collection of 1, 10, 87, 784 books and 8, 48,37, 645 articles.

For Prelims & Mains