Can scholarly pirate libraries bridge the knowledge access gap? An empirical study on the structural conditions of book piracy in global and European academia

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 15; no. 12; p. e0242509
• Main Authors: Bodó, Balázs, Antal, Dániel, Puha, Zoltán
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 03.12.2020; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Access control; Access to Information; Business models; Computer and Information Sciences; Copyright; Datasets; Developing countries; E-books; Earth Sciences; Economic aspects; Economic factors; Educational aspects; Empirical analysis; Empirical Research; Europe; File sharing sites; Gross Domestic Product; Infringement; Internationality; Knowledge; LDCs; Libraries; Models, Theoretical; Open access books; Open access publishing; People and Places; Physical Sciences; Piracy; Piracy (Copyright); Research and Analysis Methods; Scholarly Communication; Scholarly publishing; Shadows; Statistics as Topic; Textbooks; Europe; United States > US; Netherlands
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0242509

Library Genesis is one of the oldest and largest illegal scholarly book collections online. Without the authorization of copyright holders, this shadow library hosts and makes more than 2 million scholarly publications, monographs, and textbooks available. This paper analyzes a set of weblogs of one of the Library Genesis mirrors, provided to us by one of the service's administrators. We reconstruct the social and economic factors that drive the global and European demand for illicit scholarly literature. In particular, we test if lower income regions can compensate for the shortcomings in legal access infrastructures by more intensive use of illicit open resources. We found that while richer regions are the most intensive users of shadow libraries, poorer regions face structural limitations that prevent them from fully capitalizing on freely accessible knowledge. We discuss these findings in the wider context of open access publishing, and point out that open access knowledge, if not met with proper knowledge absorption infrastructures, has limited usefulness in addressing knowledge access and production inequalities.