Library Genesis

Library Genesis (shortened to LibGen) is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines. The site enables free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere. LibGen describes itself as a "links aggregator", providing a searchable database of items "collected from publicly available public Internet resources" as well as files uploaded "from users". The URL libgen.is was down in January to March of 2025.

LibGen provides access to copyrighted works, such as PDFs of content from Elsevier's ScienceDirect web-portal. Publishers like Elsevier have accused Library Genesis of internet piracy. Others assert that academic publishers unfairly benefit from government-funded research, written by researchers, many of whom are employed by public universities, and that LibGen is helping to disseminate research that should be freely available in the first place.

History

Library Genesis has roots in the illegal underground '' samizdat'' culture in the Soviet Union. As access to printing in the Soviet Union was strictly controlled and censored, dissident intellectuals would hand-copy and retype manuscripts for secret circulation. This was effectively legalized under Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, though the state monopoly on printed media remained.

The volunteers moved into the Russian computer network ("RuNet") in the 1990s, which became awash with hundreds of thousands of uncoordinated contributions. Librarians became especially active, using borrowed access passwords to download copies of scientific and scholarly articles from Western Internet sources, then uploading them to RuNet.

In the early 21st century, the efforts became coordinated, and integrated into one massive system known as Library Genesis, or LibGen, around 2008. It subsequently absorbed the contents of, and became the functional successor to, library.nu, which was shut down by legal action in 2012. By 2014, its catalog was more than twice the size of library.nu with 1.2 million records. Library Genesis claimed to have more than 2.4 million non-fiction books, 80 million science journal articles, 2 million comics files, 2.2 million fiction books, and 0.4 million magazine issues.

In 2020, the project was forked under a different domain, "libgen.fun", due to internal conflict within the project. As a result, databases are being maintained independently and content differs between libgen.fun and other LibGen domains.

As of August 2024, the project, whose website was experiencing temporary outages and technical errors, appeared to no longer be actively managed and its lead programmer was reported to be "inactive".

In mid-December 2024, as the majority of Library Genesis domains were seized or disabled through legal action from a group of publishers led by Pearson Education, the German consortium (CUII), composed of copyright holder groups and internet service providers, also instituted a country-wide blocking order against Library Genesis at the request of publishers whose names were redacted. The latter action was taken without court authorization; instead, the Federal Network Agency was consulted to clear the net neutrality requirements.

Legal issues

Litigation

Elsevier lawsuit (2015)

On June 3, 2015, Library Genesis (along with the creator of Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan) was sued by Elsevier, the academic division of the third-largest publishing group by worldwide revenue in 2014. Elsevier accused it of "operating an international network of piracy and copyright infringement" and granting free access to articles and books. In response, the admins accused Elsevier of gaining most of its profits from publicly funded research which should be freely available to all as they are paid for by taxpayers. Elsevier's lawyers then requested the Public Interest Registry to disable one of the domains covered by the lawsuit without a court order but were refused. On June 18, 2015, the District Court for the Southern District of New York allowed Elsevier to serve notice on the defendants by email. Within days of the court decision (before June 22), the then main "libgen.org" website and several mirrors went offline.

As a result of Elsevier's lawsuit, in late October 2015 the District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered LibGen to shut down and to suspend use of the domain name (libgen.org), but the site remained accessible through alternative domains.

Pearson, McGraw Hill, Macmillan and Cengage lawsuit (2023–2024)

On September 14, 2023, the educational publishers Pearson Education (the then third-largest publisher by global revenue), McGraw Hill Education, Macmillan Publishers and Cengage Group initiated a lawsuit for copyright infringement against Library Genesis before the District Court for the Southern District of New York. They claimed that the Library Genesis websites "deprive hemand their authors of income from their creative works, devalue the textbook market and heirworks, and may cause hemto cease publishing certain works". They demanded control or deletion of the Library Genesis domains and the seizure of its operators' alleged profits. On March 1, 2024, the publishers requested a default judgment and an injunction compelling the gateway providers IPFS, Pinata Technologies and Cloudflare to deny services to Library Genesis.

On September 26, 2024, a US judge ordered LibGen to pay the publishers US$30 million, but no one knows who runs it.

In December 2024, the publishers succeeded in seizing the "library.lol" domain and taking most of the other Library Genesis domains offline.

Hosting country

LibGen is reported to be registered in both Russia and the Netherlands, making the appropriate jurisdiction for legal action unclear.

Blocks

Some Libgen URLs are blocked by a number of ISPs in the United Kingdom, but such DNS-based blocks are claimed to do little to deter access. It is also blocked by ISPs in France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Belgium (which redirects to the Belgian Federal Police blockpage), and Russia (in November 2018). On March 23, 2024, the Dutch pirate site blocklist has been reported to now include Anna's Archive and Library Genesis, based on a request by BREIN, a local anti-piracy group.

Alleged Meta AI training

Court documents unsealed in March 2025 suggested that Meta Platforms had used LibGen resources to train its generative language AI models. The documents were part of a class-action lawsuit filed against Meta by the novelists Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden and comedian Sarah Silverman.

Usage

Until the end of 2014, Sci-Hub, which provides free access to millions of research papers and books, relied on LibGen as storage. Papers requested by users were requested from LibGen and served from there if available, otherwise they were fetched by other means and then stored on LibGen.

In 2019 archivists and freedom of information activists launched a project to better seed and host LibGen's data dumps. The project's spokesperson and coordinator 'shrine' described the effort as a way for a "permanent library card for the world" and reported that the response has been "overwhelmingly positive from everyone". In 2020, the project launched a peer-to-peer digital library of content on Sci-Hub and Library Genesis using IPFS.

See also

* Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
* ICanHazPDF

Explanatory notes

References

Further reading

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{{Portal bar, 1980s, Books, Education

Search engine software
File sharing communities
I2P
Intellectual property activism
Book websites
Russian digital libraries
Shadow libraries
Internet properties established in 2008