"This dissertation examines the dynamics of Black Open Access, a pirate-driven phenomenon, addressing inequities in academic publishing through shadow libraries and text piracy."
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1953321&dswid=1680 đź“–
Zakayo Kjellström (Umeå University): "Black open access: shadow libraries and text piracy"
#piracy #openaccess #shadowlibraries #mediapiracy
#ShadowLibraries
Zakayo Kjellström:
"Patterns of piracy: Sci-Hub and Sweden 2011–2018"
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24701475.2025.2482459?src=exp-la#abstract
#piracy #shadowlibraries
Funny, because MIT Press, like most publishers, do even worse to start with. Let's say you want to publish in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience:
"By your signature below, you hereby grant to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) all your right, title, and interest including copyright in and to the Article."
Ah, they want my copyrights. OK then I suppose they'll pay me for that? No:
"An APC of $1000 is assessed by JoCN for every accepted manuscript".
With that sum I could buy more equipment for our research.
So MIT want me to *pay them* to *give them* my copyrights.
And do MIT Press pay their reviewers for their review work? – Guess the answer...
What we need is a successful action on the part of the academic community to shut down these leeches of work and money.
Long live LibGen!
#libgen #shadowlibraries #copyright #copyleft #academia #scientificpublishing
Academic papers cannot be pirated, because academic research is paid by and therefore owned by the public. There, I said it.
#LibGen and other #ShadowLibraries are just cutting out the rent-seekers, a.k.a. Elsevier and the rest.
Books are a different story, though. But as always, there is a big BUT: orphaned works.
The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem .. "Many in the academic world have argued that publishers have brought this type of piracy on themselves, by making it unnecessarily difficult and expensive to access research." #llm #ai #libgen #scihub #shadowlibraries https://archive.ph/gxOL2
"Beyond LibGen: The Role of Librarians in the Post-Shadow Library Era" https://www.librarianshipstudies.com/2025/03/beyond-libgen-role-of-librarians-in.html #LibGen #ShadowLibraries
we took copies, but we didn't share .. quite a defense .. #shadowlibraries #copyright #copyleft https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-defends-its-vast-book-torrenting-were-just-a-leech-no-proof-of-seeding/
Me pasan una página chula:
https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/
Es una biblioteca fantasma de textos mantenida por bibliotecarios amateurs. La mayorĂa parece ser filosofĂa y polĂtica (Âżcon un Ă©nfasis en marxismo?), pero hay cientos de miles.
Muy fan, sobre todo por la parte de catalogación y tageado de textos, que es la parte más de 'biblioteca' que le faltaba a otras shadow libraries (como Anna's Archive).
It seems you can #download #books and magazines for free from the #internet, once you are big enough.
»details around the #torrenting were murky until yesterday, when #Meta's unredacted #emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence showed that Meta torrented "at least 81.7 #terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and #LibGen," the authors' court filing said. And "Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen."«
Faced with multi-million dollar lawsuits, large U.S. companies are no longer eager to work with Anna’s Archive. However, AI teams in other countries are less reluctant, and that creates tension. China and Japan, for example, already have AI and archival exceptions.
Pirate Libraries Are Forbidden Fruit for AI Companies. But at What Cost? #TorrentFreak #shadowlibraries #copyrightreform #LLMs
Pirate Libraries Are Forbidden Fruit for AI Companies. But at What Cost? * TorrentFreak
I’ve been thinking lately (always a mistake) about all the cultural works to which we don't have access. Everything removed from streaming; everything locked behind DRM so that most libraries and archives won't have copies which can redundantly survive disruption. Sometimes I get real sad about the future readers and historians and others who just won't be able to find copies of the incredible things made during the current digital dark age.
As ever, I try to let this radicalize me rather than lead me into despair. I know that there are lots of horrors worth raging against, but this is one I feel well-positioned to work against. It's low-stakes enough that I won't feel self-loathing if I burn out or need to take a break. It's no secret that I like to read and organize books so this is a topic close to my heart and one which can bring me joy and allow me to share it with those around me too. There is a fair bit of tech nerd stuff to it, enough that I have an opportunity to learn & practice new things, but not so much that I’m totally out of my depth. And there are plenty of communities out there to help and share strategies.
But the big thing I see missing from my understanding and many of the conversations about shadow libraries and unauthorized archivism is the social and professional practice of librarianship rather than mechanical practice of data storage. I don't have space to go to library school, but I could definitely stand to read (and archive) introductory books on the topic, or take an online class. Friends who know: what are some of the better places to get started with an introduction to library & information science and archive science?
#libraries #librarian #archivist #archives #archivism #archivist #libraryScience #informationScience #archiveScience #culture #repositories #dataHoard #archiving #piracy #unauthorizedArchives #guerillaArchives #shadowLibraries #digiPres #digitalPreservation
Library Genesis is down, but this time I'm worried.
https://torrentfreak.com/domain-seizures-and-german-isp-blockade-add-to-libgens-troubles-241222/ And, #SciHub seems to be working: "common ownership of the means of production,
free access to articles of consumption" #LibGen #LibraryGenesis. #shadowLibraries #OpenSource
"Popular shadow library LibGen continues to face trouble. In addition to ongoing technical problems, a U.S. lawsuit resulted in several domain suspensions and seizures in recent weeks. To top it off, the shadow library was just added to Germany's pirate site blocking list, making it harder to access the remaining domains."
https://torrentfreak.com/domain-seizures-and-german-isp-blockade-add-to-libgens-troubles-241222/
#Copyright #IP #Libgen #Censorship #ShadowLibraries #A2K #RentSeeking
In a new paper, Alexandra Elbakyan (the founder of #SciHub) distinguishes between four different types of “Black Open Access”:
· classic shadow libraries, e.g. Library Genesis;
· online literature-sharing communities;
· automatic tools for paywall circumvention, e.g. Sci-Hub;
· academic social networks, e.g. Academia.edu / Researchgate
She also suggests a colour spectrum to acknowledge the significance of these open access models: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202409.0197/v2
Visualizing All #ISBNs — $10k bounty by 2025-01-31 from #AnnasArchive https://annas-archive.org/blog/all-isbns.html #shadowlibraries #books #ebooks
Dear cryptographers,
technologists and activists at #38C3
We would be glad to meet you at our workshop about the social impact of cryptography.
Let's exchange some ideas about shadow libraries or decentralisation and maybe even shape a vision for a better, more secure future!
See you at Congress! :D
TIL: Someone coined the term Black Open Access
* Have we all forgotten about SciHub? (https://www.openresearch.wtf/have-we-all-forgotten-about-scihub/) summarizes the following preprint
* Alexandra Elbakyan: From Black Open Access to Open Access of Color: Accepting the Diversity of Approaches towards Free Science (https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202409.0197/v2)
#oa #schattenbibliotheken #shadowLibraries #openAccess #SciHub #BlackOpenAccess
Anna's Archive: "The critical window of shadow libraries"
https://annas-archive.org/blog/critical-window.html
"Unfortunately, the advent of LLMs, and their data-hungry training, has put a lot of copyright holders on the defensive. Even more than they already were. Many websites are making it harder to scrape and archive, lawsuits are flying around, and all the while physical libraries and archives continue to be neglected.
We can only expect these trends to continue to worsen, and many works to be lost well before they enter the public domain.
We are on the eve of a revolution in preservation, but 'the lost cannot be recovered'. We have a critical window of about 5-10 years during which it’s still fairly expensive to operate a shadow library and create many mirrors around the world, and during which access has not been completely shut down yet."
#piracy #shadowlibraries #archives #librarians
#ShadowLibraries #Copyright #IP #OpenAccess #Piracy #FileSharing: "In 2024, the Internet Archive, a massively popular digital library nonprofit, removed more than 500,000 books from its Open Library catalog after losing its appeal for being sued by four U.S. publishers. The publishers argued that the Internet Archive’s lending policy used during the pandemic, in which it loaned multiple e-book copies of a single book at once, infringed on copyright law.
This decision has sparked discussions on the importance and ethics of access to information, bringing free library sites — like shadow libraries — into the spotlight.
A shadow library is an online database of free, readily available content like books, textbooks, academic articles or other digital media. It provides access to materials that may be normally inaccessible due to paywalls or copyright conditions."
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