Library Genesis
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 The project's homepage | |
Website type | Shadow library |
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| Available in |
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| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Current status | Active |
url. Replace with website.type. Replace with website_type.programming_language. Replace with written_in.launch_date. Replace with launched.author. Replace with creator.| Part of a series on |
| File sharing and online piracy |
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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 works that are 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".
LibGen provides prohibited access to works, such as PDFs of journals 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.