A piece of knowledge, unlike a piece of physical property, can be shared by large groups of people without making anybody poorer. -Aaron Swartz
https://archive.org/
https://the-eye.eu/
https://libgen.is/
https://annas-archive.org/
https://sci-hub.se/
Should books and research be accessible to everyone, not just the privileged?
The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American nonprofit digital library founded on May 10, 1996, and chaired by free information advocate Brewster Kahle. It provides free access to collections of digitized materials including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual and print materials. The Archive also advocates for a free and open Internet. As of February 4, 2024, the Internet Archive holds more than 44 million print materials, 10.6 million videos, 1 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.8 million images, 255,000 concerts, and over 835 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine. Its mission is committing to provide "universal access to all knowledge".The Internet Archive allows the public to upload and download digital material to its data cluster, but the bulk of its data is collected automatically by its web crawlers, which work to preserve as much of the public web as possible. Its web archive, the Wayback Machine, contains hundreds of billions of web captures. The Archive also oversees numerous book digitization projects, collectively one of the world's largest book digitization efforts.
The eye
The Eye is a non-profit website dedicated to content archival and long-term preservation. "Living without the knowledge of our past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots. The Internet is a worldwide platform for sharing information. It is a community of common interests."
Library Genesis
Library Genesis (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 content that is 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 access to copyrighted works, such as PDFs of content
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.
Anna's Archive
Anna’s Archive is a non-profit project with two goals:
Preservation: Backing up all knowledge and culture of humanity.
Access: Making this knowledge and culture available to anyone in the world.
All of their code and data are completely open source.
Anna's Archive preserves books, papers, comics, magazines, and more, by bringing these
materials from various shadow libraries, official libraries, and other
collections together in one place.
This data is preserved forever by making it easy to duplicate it in bulk
— using torrents — resulting in many copies around the world.
Some shadow libraries already do this themselves (e.g. Sci-Hub, Library Genesis),
while Anna’s Archive “liberates” other libraries that don’t offer bulk distribution
(e.g. Z-Library) or aren’t shadow libraries at all (e.g. Internet Archive, DuXiu).
This wide distribution, combined with open-source code, makes Anna's Archive
resilient to takedowns, and ensures the long-term preservation of humanity’s
knowledge and culture.
Sci-Hub
Sci-Hub is the most controversial project in modern science. The goal of Sci-Hub
is to provide free and unrestricted access to all scientific knowledge.
The circulation of scientific knowledge and research is restricted by high prices.
Many students and researchers cannot afford academic journals and books that
are locked behind paywalls. Sci-Hub emerged in 2011 to tackle this problem.
Sci-Hub is helping millions of students and researchers, medical professionals,
journalists and curious people in all countries to unlock access to knowledge.
The mission of Sci-Hub is to fight every obstacle that prevents open access to knowledge: be it legal, technical or otherwise.