Library Genesis

The Library Genesis Project
The project's homepage
Type of site
Shadow library
Available in
  • English
  • Russian
URL
  • libgen.rs
  • libgen.is
  • libgen.st
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional[notes 1]
Current statusActive

Library Genesis (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.[1] 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".[2]

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.[3]


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  1. ^ Cabanac, Guillaume (April 2015). "Bibliogifts in LibGen? A study of a text-sharing platform driven by biblioleaks and crowdsourcing" (PDF). Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 67 (4): 874–884. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.698.4283. doi:10.1002/asi.23445. S2CID 6643023. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2 May 2018. Retrieved 28 November 2015.
  2. ^ "About Us". libgen.me. Archived from the original on 14 August 2019. Retrieved 6 April 2020. The libgen.me links aggregator is a community aiming at collecting and cataloging items descriptions for the most part of scientific, scientific and technical directions, as well as file metadata. In addition to the descriptions, the aggregator contains only links to third-party resources hosted by users. All information posted on the website is collected from publicly available public Internet resources and is intended solely for informational purposes.
  3. ^ Glance, David (15 June 2015). "Elsevier acts against research article pirate sites and claims irreparable harm". The Conversation (U.S. edition). Archived from the original on 11 April 2020. Retrieved 6 April 2020.