Library Genesis
Library Genesis (LibGen) is a file-sharing based shadow library website for 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 project's homepage with the English interface | |
Type of site | Shadow library |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| URL |
|
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Current status | Active |
| Part of a series on |
| File sharing |
|---|
| File hosts |
| Video sharing sites |
| BitTorrent sites |
| Media servers |
| Technologies |
| File sharing networks |
| Academic |
| P2P clients |
| Anonymous file sharing |
| History and societal aspects |
| By country or region |
| Comparisons |
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.