August 29, 2025 11:54 AM IST First published on: Aug 29, 2025 at 11:54 AM ISTIn an order dated August 19, Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora of the Delhi High Court directed the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to immediately block access to Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, and other so-called shadow libraries in India. The recent blocking is the latest step in the long-running copyright infringement suit filed by publishing giants Wiley, Elsevier and the American Chemical Society against the websites, originally filed in 2020. The defendant in the case is Alexandra Elbakyan, the Kazakh computer programmer who created Sci-Hub and LibGen. Earlier in 2015, Elsevier had filed a similar suit against the websites in a New York District Court.For Indian researchers — and more broadly, researchers and students (whether independent or affiliated to institutions) in the Global South — resources such as these websites have been an invaluable source of knowledge. As PhD scholars, my peers and I have spent far more time trawling through these “virtual libraries” than the often-patchy, inaccessible, and glitchy resources “officially” provided by the university. We have developed our own methods. Much like people in physical libraries who go through stack after stack, often finding new and interesting reads that are very different from what they set out to find specifically, these websites occasionally spring surprises on us, sharpening our knowledge and expanding our reading on various subjects only mildly connected to our theses.AdvertisementIncreasingly, in PhD thesis acknowledgements, you will find mentions of these virtual libraries apart from the names of some of the more renowned and well-known offline libraries and institutional repositories that exist. And this epistemic inequality that researchers in the Global South experience is despite the relative privilege that comes from affiliation with formidable public institutions in the country. Apart from directly accessing websites such as Sci-Hub, LibGen or others that shall not be named, we also rely on mutual sourcing of documents and journal articles through social media groups — often reaching out to our friends in universities in the United States or Europe for their better institutional access, or on occasion, asking them to hunt down and scan books that are not stocked in most libraries in India. The gatekeeping of intellectual property means we often expend extra resources and take roundabout approaches to access knowledge that should be a public good and a right for research scholars. “Hunting down” articles is what we often call it because it is as haphazard as it sounds — trying out multiple avenues, spending unnecessary time finding mirror after mirror of these blocked sites, or waiting for friends in different time zones to take time out of their own academic schedules to send us journal articles.Also Read | HC’s ban on Sci-Hub goes against the interests of the marginalisedDuring the pandemic, for instance, most libraries became physically inaccessible; many scholars also spend months, if not years, away from physical university campuses due to field work, caring for children or parents, or even other forms of employment (which has become almost necessary now, given the pitiable and non-existent fellowships, especially in social science). In such contexts, remote access to libraries is the only solution, and they are mostly in states of disrepair; if the digital access functions at all, it is often loaded with glitches or does not have full access to many important journals. Physical libraries are also sometimes physically inaccessible to persons with disabilities or even those with employment timings unsuitable for borrowing and research hours. This is apart from the fact that there are no such solutions or resources for independent scholars who are not formally affiliated with institutions or are between degrees. What about the reading needed for action research and fact-finding missions, public reports or documentation work? The people behind them are often independent and unaffiliated. How do we expect students preparing to take exams to enter these prestigious institutions in the first place to access knowledge, when they find themselves unattached to any institution and struggling with outdated or unavailable texts in smaller city libraries?What about piracy, some might ask? Well, it’s not as if the authors of these scientific articles are benefitting from the current set-up of the research and publishing industry either. They write without payment or royalties, and their emotional and physical labour is not rewarded. The same applies to peer reviewers, who spend many hours poring over these articles. In turn, publishing houses sell these articles back to us, the researchers, at exorbitant prices. It then depends on the quality of access that our universities have and how uninterrupted, smooth or extensive this access is. In JNU, for instance, journal subscriptions come and go as they please. While some people have pinned their hopes on “One Nation, One Subscription” as a model, universities pick and choose what they subscribe to as they please, and we often end up hitting virtual gateways and paywalls that we cannot overcome. In the current political climate, it is also uncertain whether a single national license model, such as the ONOS, will have sufficient diversity in journals. This is apart from the fact that about 4,000 out of the 7,008 institutions eligible for this scheme have not yet received its benefits, according to the Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth, and Sports. While the ONOS can be an answer for some journal articles, there is no other way at present to access many out-of-print or rare books in multiple languages other than what LibGen offers. What is being branded as theft and piracy is, in fact, the inevitable answer and way of surviving in a deeply hierarchical and unequal publishing industry, one that gatekeeps knowledge based on geographical location and institutional access.AdvertisementThe writer is a PhD scholar at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU