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