I’ve written several times about the renegade pirate sites that curate scientific papers and make them available for free (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Their actions are clearly illegal and some say immoral but they’re a useful corrective to the equally immoral and predatory behavior of the scientific journal publishers. All of my previous posts have focused on Sci-Hub but it turns out there is another site, Library Genesis (LibGen), that has over 33 terabytes of books, papers, and other material available. Together, the two sites ensure the availability of the papers that researchers without access to University journal subscriptions need for their research.
The publishers and their governments are not amused and have done everything they can to shut these sites down but the open access movement is fighting back. A project started by redditors is seeking to make sure that LibGen is never again offline. That’s a substantial undertaking because in addition to suing the two sites, the publishers have fought to have the sites’ hosting shutdown or blocked. Read the Vice article linked above to see what the redditors are doing to keep LibGen online.
As I’ve said before, it’s easy to be conflicted about all of this. There’s no doubt that Sci-Hub and LibGen are stealing the papers but there’s also no doubt that the publishers are predatory rent seekers who abuse the original authors, the reviewers, the schools, their subscribers and even their own editorial staffs who are mostly unpaid university volunteers. In the end, the universities themselves will probably solve this problem by refusing, as the University of California has, to renew their subscriptions unless the publishers change their business models.