Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure a ‘Pirate Bay of Science’ Never Goes Down
Credit to Author: Matthew Gault| Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2019 19:39:54 +0000
It’s hard to find free and open access to scientific material online. The latest studies and current research huddle behind paywalls unread by those who could benefit. But over the last few years, two sites—Library Genesis and Sci-Hub—have become high-profile, widely used resources for pirating scientific papers.
The problem is that these sites have had a lot of difficulty actually staying online. They have faced both legal challenges and logistical hosting problems that has knocked them offline for long periods of time. But a new project by data hoarders and freedom of information activists hopes to bring some stability to one of the two “Pirate Bays of Science.”
Library Genesis (LibGen) contains 33 terabytes of books, scientific papers, comics, and more in its scientific library. That’s a lot of data to host when countries and science publishers are constantly trying to get you shut down.
Last week, redditors launched a project to better seed, or host, LibGen's files.
“It's the largest free library in the world, servicing tens of thousands of scientists and medical professionals around the world who live in developing countries that can't afford to buy books and scientific journals. There's almost nothing else like this on Earth. They're using torrents to fulfill World Health Organization and U.N. charters. And it's not just one site index—it's a network of mirrored sites, where a new one pops up every time another gets taken down,” user shrine said on Reddit. Shrine is helping to start the project.
Two seedbox companies (services that provide high-bandwidth remote servers for uploading and downloading data), Seedbox.io and UltraSeedbox, stepped in to support the project. A week later, LibGen is seeding 10 terabytes and 900,000 scientific books thanks to help from Seedbox.io and UltraSeedbox.
LibGen also teamed up with another massive online archiving project, The-Eye, to facilitate the tracking, storage, and seeding of LibGen’s scientific archive. The-Eye is run by a user named -Archivist, who has previously tried to archive a petabyte of porn and the entirety of Instagram. and has archived 80 gigabytes of Apple videos deleted by YouTube in addition to the terabytes of data archived on The-Eye, which include conspiracy theory documents, old software, video game roms, books, and a lot more.
“We're not only trying to get the Library Genesis main collection torrents healthier, but also trying to get the complete collection so that The-Eye can properly back it up AND distribute it out in all its glory,” shrine said on Reddit. “There is currently no one doing that, so I think it's a big step towards keeping the collection safe as well as making it available to more developers who want to do something with the collection.”
Library Genesis is powered by Sci-Hub, an embattled website that provides users free access to scientific papers. Created in 2011 by hacker and scientific researcher Alexandra Elbakyan, Sci-Hub scrapes data from behind the paywalls of the world’s scientific journals and posts them for free online. Governments and private companies have attempted repeatedly to shut down Sci-Hub and sue Elbakyan, but the site remains.
This article originally appeared on VICE US.