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

Sergi Lozano,Dániel Antal,Balázs Bodó,Zoltán Puha

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0242509

Sergi Lozano, Dániel Antal + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242509

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Dec 3, 2020
Citations: 11	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Amsterdam, Tilburg University

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Library Genesis (LG or LibGen) is a copyright infringing online collection of scholarly works: monographs, edited volumes, and textbooks [1]
We observe that the two distributions yield similar predictive performance, following Gelman and Hill [58], we find that Poisson distribution fits our data generating process better because downloads are not based on independent trials, and interpreting them as a number of successes—as in a negative binomial approach—can be tricky
That research established that a significant chunk of the shadow library supply is not available in digital format and a significant share of downloads concentrate on legally inaccessible works

Summary

Introduction

Library Genesis (LG or LibGen) is a copyright infringing online collection of scholarly works: monographs, edited volumes, and textbooks [1]. GDP and internet penetration are highly significant, and have positive effects Taken together, these models suggest a result which contradicts our hypothesis that low(er) income countries may use shadow libraries more to compensate for infrastructural, and funding limitations. In the latter group, extra investment into R&D and tertiary education is associated with relatively lower download volumes, while in low-income countries the effect is exactly the opposite: higher investment into knowledge-intensive social activities generates more demand for black market knowledge. In models where the dependent variable is the raw download count (see S2 Table), we find results consistent with those above: wealth and researcher population have significant positive effects, internet proficiency has significant negative effects, R&D spending, educational attainment, disposable income, or online shopping variables are not or only weakly (at 95% level) significant. The difference between low- and high-income regions is significant and diminishes only slightly with the growth of income (Fig 5)

Findings

Discussion

Conclusions