A shadow library ban pits publishers against free information activists

Shadow libraries like LibGen and Sci-Hub 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

In early August, Indian users who accessed a website that once let them download books and scholarly journals for free found themselves locked out of the site. The landing page to Z-Library refused to load, and for some flashed a warning banner stating the site had been blocked by a court order. The block follows Delhi Tis Hazari Court’s (West) order to India’s Ministry of Communications and IT to direct Internet Service Providers (ISP) to block Z-Library’s website “within a period of one week from today (on August 1)”. The Ministry of Communications and IT was also one of the 12 defendants in the case against the shadow library, filed by Taxmann Publications Pvt. Ltd.

Z-Library is a mirror of Library Genesis (LibGen), one of the most popular shadow libraries, that lets visitors access copyrighted books and scholarly journals for free, much to the chagrin of e-book and academic journal publishers. Shadow or mirror libraries are online databases that duplicate digital records like e-books or academic articles. They are structured in a way to minimise space for backup data while enabling the continuation of critical processing in the event of the loss of a disk containing related databases. This has enabled several users to quickly compile a list of unblocked links that could take them to the banned website via another digital route. Publishers have censured these ‘rogue websites ’for stealing copyrighted content. In one instance, these sites were compared to the mythological nine-headed serpent called Hydra. It was believed that if one of its heads was cut off, two more would appear to take its place.

But several academicians and authors support the existence of such online repositories for advancing science and knowledge.

Scientists and researchers are funded by governments 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.

Once approved for publishing, in most cases, the publisher who runs the journal gets the article’s copyright transferred to itself from the author. It then sells the paper on either a pay-per-use or a bulk subscription model to readers. 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.

The Internet age that began in the early nineties saw an explosion of interest for the concept of open access in academic circles. The idea of its proponents was simple: as the cost of making a digital copy is practically zero, access to scientific articles must be made free. 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.

This moment was rightly captured by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) two decades ago. 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.