Decentralized digital preservation: the LOCKSS initiative and shadow libraries

At the beginning of the millennia, digital publishing was a fairly fine-tuned engine; the early Internet ideals of the 1980s and 1990s regarding the democratization of voices through simplistic publishing by digital means had come to fruition. Publishers, authors and libraries had all experienced the beginning of a revolution, which digitization brought to publishing and the dissemination of literature (Davidson, 2005; Darnton, 2013). The paradigm shifts that technology had for all actors were not only of a positive nature. Libraries were becoming more aware of the challenges in conserving digital media. Cultural heritage institutions also faced issues archiving digital content. Specifically, the concern for libraries was the permanence of digital journals, which, unlike physical copies of journals, were not permanently owned by the holding library but licensed over a period (or until renewal). In the wake of the discussion surrounding archiving and conserving, several solutions, both software and hardware, were invented, considered and brought into being. The Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) project was created specifically to address digital preservation needs in libraries.

LOCKSS started as a joint project between Sun Labs and Stanford University. Financed by public grants, its intention was to aid libraries in owning and preserving digital journals through the process of decentralized digital repositories. The digital repositories are designed to replicate the traditional distribution of physical journals where an issue that is published and in circulation is incredibly hard to “unpublish” (Reich and Rosenthal, 2001). LOCKSS should be seen as a safeguard against one of the key vulnerabilities of digital publishing: publishers’ ability to unilaterally remove titles from their databases, which can simultaneously affect libraries worldwide. Essentially, LOCKSS secures the existence of a digital journal by creating caches (i.e. copies) regardless of whether the journal in question is still in subscription by the library or not and can be recreated at sites where the digital copy may have been destroyed or vanished (Reich and Rosenthal, 2001). The LOCKSS methodology of distributed caches of copies is a way to facilitate the possibility of digital preservation over a longer period of time (Snickars, 2010; Laakso et al., 2021). However, this is not the sole use value for a technology or rather methodology such as that envisioned by the developers at Stanford (and, for example, the Library of Congress’ Chronopolis project). In the world of piracy, an alternative measure of the use of the LOCKSS methodology has been employed to sustain an ambiguous decentralized centralization, partly through the use of cyberlockers ^[1] and partly to spread the risk by having several mirrored website names and domains with the same content. Perhaps not so surprisingly, as this study will show, the same sort of pattern can be found in shadow libraries with a more open-source (and ad-free) culture surrounding it.

The aim of this paper is to understand the relations between the sites themselves and to begin to resolve the larger question: Can one speak of coherent shadow library networks? In doing so, the intention is to answer the following questions:

1. How do shadow libraries maintain connections with each other?

2. How are shadow libraries, as websites, able to evade legislative consequences?

Shadow libraries are vast digital repositories of literature. They take on many different shapes and forms, some focusing on specific literature, such as certain academic disciplines or books in specific languages, while others are more focused on various document types such as articles or comic books (Bodó, 2018). Their existence marks the beginnings of the longer visions of a universal library as professed by several scholars during the 20th century (Bodó, 2018). At the same time, the shadow libraries are ideological projects, built on the ideas of the early Internet and grounded more clearly into the present by prominent Internet activists such as Aaron Swartz and his staunch opposition to the structure of scientific publishing, due to their increasing control over the information market (Snickars, 2015). His views have been further affirmed and restructured in both scientific studies and new manifests regarding the state of publishing (Bárok et al., 2015; Shu and Larivière, 2024).

To further understand the goal of this article, an understanding of the various shadow libraries must first be established. Library Genesis, or LibGen, should be perceived as one of the central actors within the larger shadow library ecology. The webpage was created in 2008 by a group of anonymous Russian scholars and was shot into prominence after taking over the first large repository of English language literature, Gigapedia/Library.nu, when it was shut down over a lawsuit (Bodó, 2018). Lawrence Liang wrote the following regarding Library.nu’s closure.

LibGen serves a dual function: it maintains a comprehensive index of academic literature across hard and soft sciences while also acting as a direct content host. Unlike platforms that only catalog or link to external content, LibGen physically stores full-text files on its own servers. This includes academic papers, comic books and fiction, enabling direct downloads from the site itself. The platform’s total hosted collection currently exceeds 25 TB of content, making it one of the largest repositories of its kind. Additionally, LibGen makes its entire database, including both the index and hosted files, available for users to download and mirror. Sci-Hub, a more prominent shadow library, was created by the Kazakh scholar Alexandra Elbakyan, who still singlehandedly runs it to this day (Elbakyan, 2019). Unlike LibGen, it has a much clearer stated purpose, aiming to emancipate the academic world from scientific publishers through the pursuit of its personal brand of open access. This is one that Elbakyan says differs from the one first envisioned by Aaron Swartz (Elbakyan, 2019). Sci-Hub was previously connected to LibGen servers, automatically uploading and storing newly downloaded articles in the LibGen repository; however, this collaborative aspect was only prevalent during a short period of time.

Z-library is more intimately connected to LibGen than Sci-Hub is. Z-library actively encourages user contributions through a structured incentive system. Users who upload new content or help identify duplicate entries receive “points” that can be exchanged for enhanced download privileges, including higher daily download limits and priority access. The platform also rewards users who improve metadata or provide missing bibliographic information. This gamified approach to crowdsourcing has helped Z-library build its collection of over 10 million books and 86 million articles. The reward system creates a self-sustaining cycle where active contributors gain better access while simultaneously expanding the library’s holdings (Kjellström, 2022). Their connection is mostly due to partially acting as a mirror from the Library Genesis site. Z-library, like LibGen, has a mixed collection, but as the site is, to a certain degree, maintained by the community, it is much more of a potpourri in comparison.

Aside from these three “giants,” there are several smaller shadow libraries that are interesting primarily due to their specializations, including Aaaaarg, which focuses on the arts and critical theory, or uberty, which has similar ambitions. Memory of the World works differently than other shadow libraries and is solely dependent on their user base for their collection. The website acts as a network hub of many personal shadow libraries that are run locally, working off of the principle “when everyone is librarian, the library is everywhere” (Monoskop.org, 2019).

Over the years, shadow libraries like Sci-Hub, LibGen and Z-library have been the target of lawsuits in at least seven different countries (Van Der Sar, 2024). Most recently, the American Chemical Society, Elsevier and Wiley filed a lawsuit against Sci-Hub in the Delhi High Court, asking the courts to demand that Internet service providers block access to the site (Tobin, 2022). A consequence of the litigious efforts against Sci-Hub is the dispersed nature of the platform over several domains. Since Sci-Hub was created, it has attached itself to a variety of generic top-level domains to avoid blockage and maintaining an online status throughout court battles. This is by no means unique for Sci-Hub, as the same pattern of dispersion can be found for the sites Z-library and LibGen. In this context, the LOCKSS methodology plays a valuable role in sustaining a stable ground for the shadow library sites to remain somewhat stable over a period of many years. Seeing as both LibGen and Sci-Hub have successfully operated for more than a decade, while Library.nu was active between the years 2004 and 2012 ^[2].

Digital preservation systems are most likely designed on one of two principles: traditionally centralized institutional repositories or distributed peer-to-peer networks. The LOCKSS system, developed as a joint project between Stanford University and Sun Labs, pioneered the distributed approach by enabling libraries to maintain and preserve digital journals through decentralized repositories (Reich and Rosenthal, 2001). This methodology was specifically designed to replicate the preservation characteristics of physical journal collections, where published content becomes very difficult to “unpublish” once in circulation. The LOCKSS approach addresses a key vulnerability in digital publishing – the ability for publishers to remove or modify content after publication, potentially affecting multiple libraries simultaneously. By creating distributed caches that persist regardless of subscription status, LOCKSS provides libraries with genuine ownership and preservation capability for their digital collections (Reich and Rosenthal, 2001). The distributed nature of these caches enhances long-term preservation prospects by allowing content to be reconstructed even if individual copies are lost or damaged.

While LOCKSS was developed for legitimate preservation by libraries, its core methodology of distributed copies has been adapted by shadow libraries in ways its creators likely did not anticipate. These unauthorized repositories have emerged using similar distributed preservation techniques to ensure their own persistence. They take various forms from broad collections like Library Genesis (LibGen) and Z-library to more specialized archives focused on specific disciplines or document types (Bodó, 2018). The shadow libraries’ adaptation of distributed preservation techniques has proven remarkably effective at sustaining access despite legal challenges. When faced with domain seizures or blocking, these repositories migrate to new domains while maintaining distributed copies of their content. Through this approach, platforms like Sci-Hub and LibGen have operated continuously for over a decade, outlasting predecessors like Library.nu, which operated from 2004 to 2012.

Legality and copyright are of chief concern in digital preservation, as they can act as a hindrance to effective preservation efforts. As Hockx-Yu (2014) notes, the “crisis of scale” in digital preservation requires institutions to manage not only exponentially growing content volumes but also the complex legal frameworks that govern their preservation and access rights. The traditional role of libraries as knowledge custodians has become increasingly complicated in the digital age, requiring detailed rights metadata, sophisticated access controls and careful management of license terms and orphan works (Ahmad et al., 2023). Furthermore, since the digitization of most journal content, libraries are no longer in control of their collection, as it is stored online remotely (Burnhill, 2013). This fundamental shift has created new legal challenges in digital preservation, requiring institutions to navigate complex copyright landscapes while maintaining clear chains of custody for preserved content. The relationship between legal considerations and preservation efforts necessitates integrated solutions that address both technical and rights management requirements, including robust access control mechanisms and preservation metadata systems that can track and enforce varying levels of access rights.

These legal and copyright challenges are further complicated by the international nature of digital content, requiring preservation systems to accommodate different jurisdictional requirements while maintaining compliance with various deposit legislations and license agreements. In a recent study on digital preservation, it was made clear that policies along with technology and strategy were essential to sustain digital objects and collections (Ahmad et al., 2023), meaning that the success of digital preservation often hinges on effectively navigating the legal frameworks that govern digital content preservation and access (Ahmad et al., 2023). Furthermore, the digital preservation landscape has been fundamentally transformed by the “digital deluge,” which has seen the convergence of massive digitization and born-digital content creation (Conway, 2010). This transformation presents cultural heritage institutions with complex dilemmas around quality, expertise and resource allocation. Conway argues that preservation in the digital age requires a fundamental rethinking of traditional preservation ethics and practices, particularly around quality standards and the skills needed by preservation specialists. He notes that while digitization technologies offer new preservation opportunities, they also create tensions between traditional preservation values focused on maximum quality and the realities of large-scale digital initiatives. This reorientation of preservation practice requires institutions to make difficult choices between investing in physical conservation versus digital preservation infrastructure, including recognition of factors such as copyright.

In contrast, the research on shadow libraries has focused on analyzing the use of platforms and their impact – rather than preservation. Studies have analyzed download data released by Sci-Hub in 2016 and 2017, with Bohannon (2016) providing one of the most influential analyses. This dataset spawned further investigations by researchers such as Bendezu-Quispe et al. (2016) and Nazarovets (2018), primarily examining download patterns and user behavior. Research attention has concentrated heavily on LibGen and Sci-Hub, with comparatively little investigation of other platforms like Aaaaarg and Z-library. Most studies have focused on usage patterns and historical development rather than technical infrastructure (Snickars, 2015; Bodó, 2018; Kjellström, 2022; Nicholas et al., 2019). Cabanac (2016) has examined LibGen’s development through biblioleaks and crowdsourcing without a detailed analysis of its preservation methods. This study aims to fill a gap in current research by examining how these shadow library repositories and networks maintain persistence through distributed copies and domain changes, analyzing both their technical infrastructure and network connections. Rather than focusing solely on usage statistics or historical development, focus is put on how shadow libraries leverage both technical and social infrastructure to sustain operations despite legal challenges, and in doing so, they act as preserving agents.

The material for the study was collected by using the tool Hyphe developed at the Sciences Po medialab. Hyphe is a user-centric Web Crawler developed with the intention to be used in social science research, and this includes certain affordances in both design and performance to benefit the construction of a corpus when researching the parts of the “generic” web that do not support extraction via an Application Programming Interface (API) (Jacomy et al., 2016). As this study aims to map the relations between shadow libraries, which exist in a legal gray area, Hyphe allows for a deep dive into the connections between shadow library actors and an understanding of the connections to each site by observing where hyperlinks from shadow libraries lead to. All the graphs produced in this study use the Force Atlas algorithm found in Gephi. This algorithm separates each node crawled and draws together those that are connected. More influential nodes are centered while others are pushed toward the fringe.

The first domains chosen for analysis were initially collected from the website monoskop.org. Monoskop is a wiki of sorts, specializing in collecting information on art, critical theory, software culture and other adjacent fields. One of the many pages on the platform is a link list to what they call “digital libraries” (the page itself is called “shadow libraries”); from this list, a selection of libraries was chosen based on a few criteria: the sites needed to have an extensive repository of downloadable copyright protected books or articles, the texts needed to be freely accessible and the sites in question could not have any protection from robots such as a captcha, which would impede the crawling process. Based on these criteria, the websites Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, Memory of The World and Aaaaarg were selected. A site absent from Monoskop was Z-library, which was added along with the smaller shadow library Uberty. Finally, a series of subreddits were included to delve into community connections associated with the shadow libraries as follows: r/Scholar, r/scihub, r/libgen and r/Piracy. Together these sites form the hypothesized community of shadow libraries and the starting point for the crawls performed with the tool Hyphe.

The building of the dataset follows the reasoning of the “associative query snowballing technique,” where the initial step is an inquiry or a research question to build from (Rogers, 2019). By doing this, an entry point to the network is granted and the possibility for an extended list of websites becomes attainable, which is what was done by initiating the study with a visit to Monoskop. For this study, Rogers is the main methodological guide, and the reading of the crawled hyperlinks and the subsequent discussion is based on his perspective of a quantitative overview of the network, followed by closer readings into what the shadow libraries’ domains, connections and copies mean from a more hermeneutical standpoint (Rogers, 2019).

Platform studies should be understood as research with a focus on the connections between a platform technology and their respective creative output (Bogost and Montfort, 2009a). Platform technologies can mean many different things, such as a video game system or an operating system (Bogost and Montfort, 2009a). A platform as such does not necessarily have to be a physical technology, i.e. hardware, but should be premised and understood based on its effect on how cultural creativity or production may be shaped because of the specific platform chosen. However, this does not mean that everything within the media, or even cultural, landscape can or should be considered a platform. One of the base criteria for understanding platforms as a concept, in the context of platform studies, is if it can be programmable (Bogost and Montfort, 2009b). Moving forward on this specific criterion, the idea of the shadow libraries as platforms may at first seem slightly dubious – despite their existence being contingent on webpages – which are highly programmatic. Still, the development in the research of platforms has extended itself beyond the original understanding including, for example, social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter (Plantin et al., 2018). To understand shadow libraries from this theoretical perspective, a wider net must be cast, not with the intention of disregarding aspects of platform studies that discount shadow libraries as platforms per se, but to fully engage their affordances from a variety of angles, thus enabling a clearer theoretical distinction when working with a network-based methodology. With this in mind, an additional angle, borrowed from Plantin et al. (2018), will be added to aspects of platform studies – namely that of infrastructure. Infrastructure studies are built on two major intellectual lines, one that aims at studying large technical systems and another that focuses more primarily on the sociology of infrastructures, which additionally deals closely with the human elements that interact with infrastructures (Plantin et al., 2018). For this study, the mixed approach of “infrastructuralized platforms” or “platformized infrastructures” will give insights into how the shadow libraries connect, interact and sustain themselves despite threats from the formalized information sector.

The wider spectrum of shadow libraries, both small and large, has several intersections and commonalities. When looking at the individual, the larger sites, Libgen, Sci-Hub and Z-library, have quite defined connections to each other. As the crawler searches for links from the specified starting point, a vast web of nodes can only be created by the existence of hyperlinks. More clickable links on a site equal to a larger number of edges and nodes closely related to the site in question. To some extent, this goes against the suggestive nature of the massive amounts of links surrounding the two sites, Memory of the World and Uberty, as it implies that they are larger. To further understand what the link networks actually represent, a delving into these two sites is required.

Uberty, from the Latin word for richness, means abundance and fertile growth (see Wiktionary) – a fitting name for a shadowy library with a rich collection of niche subjects. Uberty aims to build a collection on modern philosophical thought, with a penchant for “accelerationism, new rationalism and other developing theory and philosophy” (Uberty, 2024). Uberty does not only conform to the content of the site, in fact, it more aptly describes how the site itself is structured in relation to other venues of information. Uberty acts as a bricolage of documents hosted on other sites. Although Uberty collects and maintains some literature on the site, it also stretches beyond and extends its collection by sourcing it to other sections of the Internet. Uberty, as such, is a path into other (minor and greater) collections of texts – like a virtual library steward. All the links from Uberty are not just means of extension but parts of Uberty itself. From this view, the abundance is not only related to content but also contextual matters.

Navigating the site reveals the nature of the link network as seen in Figure 1 is created. Uberty gives users the possibility to navigate their collection either through an alphabetic sorting of individual authors or through a tagging system relating to subjects. When clicking a book or text, users will be taken either to Uberty’s own repository or to one of the many sites found around the central Uberty node. As the site aims to collect texts for specific subjects, there is no discrimination between where the text is hosted, meaning that links to sites such as accelerationism.wordpress.com can be found alongside Cornell.edu. Through this collection, choice Uberty attains a quality unlike the actually larger shadow libraries found in Figure 2.

A similar structure of links found around Uberty, Memory of the World boasts a seemingly large amount of links from its site. Once again, this simply shows how the crawler works, as the crawler does not necessarily reveal large or well-used a site is, but which connections emanate from them as a starting point. Memory of the World has, apart from a large collection of texts, several blogpost-like writings on the webpage. These posts often include links to certain points referenced, giving the node Memory of the World the set of links surrounding it.

In Figure 3, intricate connections between the various Sci-Hub domains can be found. For this crawl, the web crawler was set with the intention of making and collecting information on the deepest level possible for Hyphe. Each of the black nodes was included in the original corpus for crawling; all blue edges and nodes show the results of the web crawl, i.e. the sites that are connected to the initial pages in the corpus. These were 41610.org, Sci-hub.shop, Sci-hub.ee, Sci-hub.st, Sci-hub.se, Sci-hub.ru, Sci-hub.tw, Reddit.com/Sci-hub and Sci-hub.do. Together these links form a fractured and partial, but somewhat of an overview of the Sci-Hub network.

One of the nodes, 41610.org, is integral to the connectivity between domains. 41,610 is a Sci-Hub-adjacent site that provides users with links to one of the many active Sci-Hub domains. Using this site as a starting point for a crawl gives perspectives on the overview of active Sci-Hub links and reveals connections to other sites in the shadow library ecology. For example, there is a link a connection to a node called library.lol. This node is similar in function to the 41,610 site; however, instead of providing active links to various Sci-Hub domains, library.lol gives an overview of active links to the shadow library Library Genesis. Additionally, crawls from 41,610 leads to sites libgen.gz, libgen.li, libgen.me and libgen.gs, all of which belong to the Library Genesis network of domains. This is not the sole discovery that can be deduced from this specific node. From 41,610 other interesting sites come into play such as the forum Hubg.org, a site vaguely connected to Sci-Hub, with different types of information about the site, interspersed with article requests, technical questions and political posts. Another interesting site found in the 41,610 network of connections is the marketing site “boook.link”, used by authors to automatically direct their readers to store, which hold copies of their books. One interesting and noteworthy connection to the 41,610 node is the site for Creative Commons. Sci-hub.shop is one of Sci-hub’s many domains; apart from the clear connection to 41,610 – like so many other of the platform’s domains – it lacks any connections with the exception of 99lb, a site that seems to be a Chinese encyclopedia of sorts. Interestingly, this is one of the few current Sci-Hub domains (included) that has a consistently stable retrieval system for newer articles.

The Reddit node is an interesting addition to the network of Sci-Hub links. Primarily as it is not actually connected to the Sci-Hub website as the other explicit fashions. Its inclusion in the network, however, gives an idea of the user side of Sci-Hub and what other interests may be compelling to them. One such instance is the significant prevalence of computer and/or tech-related websites such as Stack Overflow, GitHub, Cybernews, Techdirt, etc. Another aspect of the Reddit nodes network is that of security with sites such as Proton VPN, Safenames and CroxyProxy. Another interesting aspect worth mentioning in this node's network is the mix of academic website and open access sources such as Nature and Inside Higher Ed alongside Libgen, Wikipedia, Unpaywall, Unblockit and Open Access Button. These are only an example of how to thematize the nodes links, but a glance such as this reveals quite a bit about the way Sci-Hub might interact with non-Sci-Hub sites. For example, one can deduce based on the nodes in the Reddit network that users of Sci-Hub have a vested interest in Internet security, such as VPNs and proxies, that they may be interested in academia to some extent but have a more intimate relationship with websites dealing with programming and technology on a more general level. Finally, one can see several pathways leading to open access sites, meaning a somewhat vested interest in open-source and “copyleft” areas of the web.

The intimate nature that the Sci-hub.ru and Sci-hub.se domains share is quite remarkable (see Figure 4) – of all the Sci-Hub domains, they have by far the most intimate relationship – one that could be presumed to be shared between all the domains. This is not the entire truth, as the two sites share connections to similar sites. In addition to having quite a close connection to each other, the Sci-hub.ru and Sci-hub.se domains have a tightly interwoven set of links than the other Sci-Hub domains.

Notwithstanding, all the Sci-Hub domains share connections with each other, and the remarkable aspect here is the connections to other sites that the Sci-hub.ru and Sci-hub.se domains share in plenty. This may be related to the more extensive content that can be found on these two domains, such as links to statistics about the sites, extensive information on Alexandra Elbakyan and the site, as well as a list of “latest reads” showing the latest download requests on the platform. Out of all the domains probed for this paper, .Sci-hub.ru and Sci-hub.se are the only ones with this extended information tab. Their connections could also be indicative of the centrally run Sci-Hub sites controlled by Elbakyan – more on this aspect in the next section.

The network of subreddits seen in Figure 5 reveals connections between four subreddits associated with shadow libraries, namely r/piracy, r/scihub,/rlibgen and r/scholar. In this network, the most interesting aspect is not the unique individual links from each subreddit but rather the connecting “cloud” in the middle. Using the centrality as a focal point, an idea of integral points in the shadow library networks may be alluded to. The heaviest weighted connections are also the most obvious one and concern the main Reddit websites, for example, such as redditinc.com and reddit.com. The same can be said of sites such as Google and Wikipedia, which generally are well connected throughout the web.

One level down, with fewer connections, we can start seeing traces of a shadow library network with LibGen and Sci-Hub domains. Connections to the domains are divided between the four subreddit nodes, sometimes connected and sometimes not. For the purpose of an overview, they are regarded as different entry points to the same platforms. Additionally, like in the Sci-Hub and overall overview, there are links to sites such as Cloudflare and Proton VPN.

This is a repeating pattern found throughout the crawls performed in this study: shadow libraries are, to an extent, interconnected. Their connection, however, is not as described by previous research, where Sci-Hub and LibGen seemingly are perceived as two sides of the same coin (Cabanac, 2016). In the case of Reddit, for example, it should be perceived as a consequence of shadow library users and their interest aligning at intersections throughout the web. This could be rooted back to the end user and how they, as a collective, see these as equally important parts of a larger infrastructure of an illicit information network.

Many of the pirate websites utilize similar methods of multiple domains to ensure that their platforms can provide their services over a prolonged period of time. Thus, extensive copies of their websites provide existential security for the site administrators and stability for the end user. What is different between the older and the newer generation of shadow libraries is the adherence to a distinct top-level domain that no longer exists, which is also apparent in the list of Sci-Hub sites crawled. To further understand how this ties into the proposed question of their longevity and stability, this section will tie the previous section together with perspectives from infrastructure studies and propose an understanding of Pirate LOCKSS. This will show how the appropriation of legal methodologies has created a coherent shadow library network– beyond the apex of any singular website.

The general perspective of infrastructure in relation to Internet platforms usually exemplifies the central agents of the non-open web, such as Google and Facebook, as typical platforms that through their monopolization of much of digital social life or search, have become infrastructuralized platforms by ubiquitously embedding themselves in online culture (Plantin et al., 2018). Some sites on the open web (as opposed to the large platforms like Google and Facebook), however, are able to tap into the size of the larger platforms and fill in the gaps at moments of breakdown.

Ruptures in the operations of large infrastructuralized platforms tie into Star and Ruhleder’s conception of infrastructural breakdown– essentially when the “sustained relations” that comprise the infrastructure momentarily disrupt ^[3] (Simonsen et al., 2020). In the section on crawled websites, several of the sites found in the networks around the shadow library domains are major social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. To understand how the second-generation shadow library sites, as opposed to sites such as library.nu, have been able to survive despite threats of litigation and constant change of domains, it boils down to two major factors: points of entry without illegal materials such as 41610.org (which guides users to active Sci-Hub domains) or library.lol (which guides users to active LibGen domains) and the use of the Internet-centralized and -infrastructuralized platforms to share the load of dissemination. The points of entry are largely self-explanatory, and they provide the stability that can’t be achieved when hosting copyright-infringing material.

Found in the networks are links from shadow libraries to their corresponding social media sites on various platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Although these specific sites do not necessarily advertise active links to, for example, Sci-Hub, they act as a medium between the sites and their users, allowing for engagement without relying on a specific domain.

The shadow libraries are embedded into “other structures, social arrangements and technologies” by their nature, and this is exemplified in their reliance not only on other platforms but also on their dependency on (and ideological protest against) the publishing industry, which also extends itself to the academic sector and research at large (Star and Ruhleder, 1996, p. 113). The embeddedness of shadow libraries in the publishing industry can also be seen in the network graphs, as hyperlinks from the libraries stretch out and into various academic publishers (see Figure 4 for example).

This ties into another one of the qualities of the infrastructure: “links with conventions of practice,” which in extension brings forth the fundamental change that the shadow libraries have produced in the academic publishing world, which one can see from the lawsuits rendered by the academic publishing world (Star and Ruhleder, 1996, p. 113; Else, 2021)

The clearest link with conventions, however, is found in the spread of the platforms within academia; these tendencies have previously been discussed in Bohannon (2016), Cabanac (2016) and more. The network graphs and the hyperlinks they represent additionally illustrate the network qualities of shadow libraries as a whole. Partly due to the reach and scope of the actual platforms, which extend beyond the individual sites themselves ^[4].

Furthermore, as the hyperlink networks show, there is a distinct and close relationship with the academic world, and the shadow library infrastructure should be seen as a learned membership, which, in the context of infrastructure, Star and Ruhleder describe as a “target object to be learned about” (1996, p. 113). Essentially, their close relationship with the academic world makes the shadow library a part of the academic experience, not necessarily apparent for all of its members but an integral component once it has been learned. To accentuate how this relationship works on a practical level, one can only look toward acknowledgment sections found in published papers, where Sci-Hub creator Alexandra Elbakyan and the site itself are shown gratitude (see Figure 6).

Latching onto the existing infrastructuralized platforms can manifest in a variety of ways. In the figures in the previous section, one can find links to various larger sites on the web to understand the connections a bit deeper a closer reading is required. The first site that needs attention is Twitter, specifically the now-defunct Twitter user called “@scihubmirrors1.” This account’s sole function was to give daily updates on the currently working Sci-Hub domains – for an excerpt of the feed, (see Figure 7).

Another example of how larger platforms are used to form a cohesive infrastructure of shadow libraries is Wikipedia. Almost all of the Sci-Hub domains crawled has some link to the Wikipedia page about either Alexandra Elbakyan or Sci-Hub. At first, this might seem obvious, but the implication of their connectedness runs deeper than mere association. On both of the wikis, there are links to the most up-to-date Sci-Hub domains; for example, the wiki on Alexandra Elbakyan has cited Sci-Hub for the biographical information on her. By doing so, users can consistently rely on Wikipedia (and Wikipedians) to find out where the currently active domains are. A similar methodology is employed for the Sci-Hub wiki, where links to can be found in the description of the site (see Figure 8 for further clarification).

The same pattern can be found of the other two major shadow library sites Z-library and Library Genesis, which also use Wikipedia to show where their active domains are. This, however, also says something significant about the nature of Wikipedia and its role as infrastructure on the web (Haider and Sundin, 2020).

The examples of Twitter and Wikipedia show, in a practical manner, the procedural ontology of infrastructure and, more importantly, “infrastructuring” (Simonsen et al., 2020). When viewing shadow libraries as an infrastructure in their own right, it should be noted that this infrastructure exists beyond the administrators and the platforms themselves and is, more fundamentally, comprised of the relations on the platforms beyond the actual shadow libraries. Furthermore, the way in which shadow libraries appear outside of their own domains lends some credence to further defining them as infrastructural components.

Figure 8 illustrates how shadow libraries latch onto other infrastructures to spread, i.e. “infrastructuring”. Notwithstanding, the platforms display many qualities, which at least give the appearance of infrastructural qualities. Without dragging the point of the infrastructural argument too far, there is an argument to be made, based on the hyperlinks, that the complete shadow library network could be viewed as an infrastructure. This is important to understand partially due to the shift, which the creation and continuation of shadow libraries has made for the academic world. More importantly, it ties into the way in which these platforms of information should be viewed, especially regarding the previously defined LOCKSS methodology and the act of infrastructural bricolage (Erickson and Sawyer, 2019).

Dispersing the domains of the platforms in a LOCKSS-like fashion, with the addition of the interlocking nature of the shadow library network with formalized platforms, the creation of the structure rather than the event (using Levi-Strauss terminology) conforms to the shape of the networks of hyperlinks found. These factors together can be seen as the constitutive parts of the shadow library infrastructure. They are important to distinguish and establish to describe the impact that the shadow libraries have had on the academic world or using Geoffrey Bowker’s terminology – the infrastructural inversion of academic information infrastructure (Bowker and Star, 1999). This occurs on multiple levels. Firstly, as a restructuring of how individuals that are connected to or interested in academia obtain the research needed to continue their work. Secondly, the inversion is manifested in the manipulation of established resources and platforms to create and maintain the significant collections that are needed to compete with the traditional channels of information acquisition.

Similar to how tech giants have used platforms to establish infrastructure, the introduction of shadow libraries has sporadically formed a coherent infrastructure through the reliance on larger platforms (Plantin et al., 2018). This coincides with the LOCKSS methodology and extends beyond just multiple domains for singular shadow library sites. Essentially, they have become an almost rhizomatic network, extending and shrinking disjointedly throughout larger platforms while simultaneously latching themselves onto and into the existing infrastructures for information acquisition.

The rhizomatic structure is preferred here, instead of a network, due to the disjointedness of the shadow library projects. Every “official” domain of Sci-Hub, 9LibGen or Z-library, for example, has an unofficial counterpart, equivalent in scope, design and purpose to its original. The copies extend beyond likeness, and they are sometimes exact to an almost clinical level, making it impossible for the end user to know which site is administered by the original progenitor and which one is a copy. In view is another aspect of “piracy,” namely, the piracy of piracy or what this paper proposes – Pirate LOCKSS.

What distinguishes Pirate LOCKSS is its manifold nature; for shadow libraries, it consists of the initial observation for this paper – the many domains that the platforms are dispersed on; however, as established, this is not the sole distinguishing feature of Pirate LOCKSS. Spreading over many other official platforms, such as the aforementioned reliance on sites such as Wikipedia, Reddit and Twitter, is what makes Pirate LOCKSS unique.

Comparing it with the original Stanford project, piracy works on several levels within the shadow library network. This is not rooted in moral or theoretical questions but is expressed in the practical dimensions of shadow library dissemination: the unofficial domain. As the purpose of the shadow libraries, in large, is to circumvent the economic barriers of publishing, their ideological foundation is built on a radical perspective of open access – and in extension, open source – which invites the duplication of their sites with the requirement that their ideals are followed. The unofficial domain is then created at the behest of those that are not officially attached to the original site but act independently of the shadow libraries, occasionally for personal gain with the inclusion of ads. Most often, however, these copies are simply added to the wider shadow library network, unprompted in their creation and varied in their purpose.

Copies within the shadow library ecosystem are not always created with benevolent intentions. While the Pirate LOCKSS methodology shares characteristics with rhizomatic structures – growing and spreading organically through multiple connection points – the proliferation of copies isn’t solely driven by idealistic Internet activism. Some copies are created to exploit users, either through advertising revenue or potentially malicious intent. This complexity reflects how the very feature that makes shadow libraries resilient – their ability to be copied and distributed – can also make them vulnerable to misuse. This is not a value judgment based on the administrators of the original shadow libraries. There are copies that are not designed to be functional for the end user but still present as an actual shadow library. These copies do not have a collection and are instead poor facsimiles created to trick users that they are another run-of-the-mill and benign unofficial copy. For example, the intimate connection between Sci-hub.se and the Sci-hub.ru domains is not by happenstance. They, along with the Sci-hub.st, are the ones that are officially the “projects working links” (see Figure 9).

Some copies have certain markers that separate them from the three “original project mirrors,” such as ads muddling the search project, as in Figure 10.

Partially, the existence of cases such as the one in Figure 10 could be a consequence of the downloadable LibGen collection, the various entry points into shadow libraries such as 41,610 and library.lol or even the spread on social media. Regardless, it shows how extensive copies pop up to utilize a name like Sci-Hub for personal gain. The idea of Pirate LOCKSS is not only theoretical but also a proven praxis among the shadow libraries. Z-library recently suffered from a loss of domains after the registrar of the site had received copyright complaints from Harvard University. Their response to the takedown was to “maximize traffic diversification” (Van Der Sar, 2024). Z-libraries' admission clarifies that the way in which shadow library sites hope for survival is by creating copies of content, of domains and of principles – all with the hope of maintaining their ideological conviction in spreading the access to knowledge across all boards. The idea of Pirate LOCKSS additionally stretches beyond the idea of just securing the continued existence of a shadow library site. Throughout the sites observed in this study, one can find reliable archives of books that may suddenly disappear from conventional digital libraries. Despite comments regarding the safety of these sites or the idea that they may distribute or even produce information that is not reliable, they can prove to be the only way to secure the existence of titles online.

On the 31st of August 2022, Wiley suddenly removed more than 1,300 ebook titles, showing that the nature of digital licensing, especially in the context of electronic books, does not provide the security required by libraries when the ebooks are made available as parts of the big publisher bundles. A shadow library network, backed up through several domains, could prove to be essential in order for “conventional” libraries to have backup in cases such as the one above. Libraries in Ireland were devastated as they saw course literature, often recommended literature for classes, disappear without warning overnight (Library Association of Ireland, n.d.). It speaks partly to the importance of the original LOCKSS project but also the important pirate element in shadow libraries and what it does when securing the continued existence of the sites.

When viewing the shadow libraries from a link perspective, it may come easy to instantly assume an inherent connection between them, that they are bound together by their shared purpose – freely sharing copyrighted literature. The hyperlinks, however, only tell a partial story. When analyzing any form of piracy, it is easy to fall into traps of wide generalizations on communities and ideology. As the aim of this paper states, can one speak of this patchwork of sites as a coherent shadow library network? Partially, this study has shown that the basis of a network exists and the shadow libraries are connected to each other. To answer the first question posed for this study – how do shadow library sites maintain connections with each other? – it is not needed to look further than the centralized platforms throughout the web. Internet sites such as Wikipedia, Reddit, X and Facebook act as camouflage – not necessarily to obfuscate but to alleviate the connections between the sites – primarily due to the larger platform’s stability. When discussing infrastructure, one of the more common sentiments is that they go by unnoticed until collapsed, which speaks to both the theoretical implications of viewing the central Internet sites as a safe harbor for maintaining linkages between not just different shadow library sites but the same sites across different domains. The hyperlinks alone do give indication to this, but as the discussion in the previous sections shows, there is a continued need to closer interrogate snapshots collected from the infrastructuralized platforms or platformized infrastructures, which illustrate of the central sites glue the shadow library network together.

To answer how shadow libraries can evade legislative consequences, it is imperative to relate it to how they maintain the network. Once again, the intrastructuralized central platforms play a large part; much like the case of maintenance, they are similarly used as connective points to maintain survival. However, the most important aspect of survival lies in the proposed concept of pirate LOCKSS. The ability to multiply without restriction, which is the basis for digital piracy, is in pirate LOCKSS actualized to an extreme degree due to the openness built into shadow library culture. The shadow libraries, which openly share everything, enable widespread copying, which is an immensely powerful tool for survival. Drawbacks of pirate LOCKSS can be the appropriation of shadow library sites for more malicious intentions.

Further research could expand on several aspects revealed in this study of shadow library networks and Pirate LOCKSS methodology. The identified “poor copies” of shadow libraries warrant deeper investigation, particularly regarding their effects on the broader shadow library infrastructure and user trust. Research attention could also be directed toward examining how infrastructural inversion of academic information continues to evolve as shadow libraries become more embedded in scholarly practice, as evidenced by the acknowledgments to platforms like Sci-Hub in published papers. Additionally, the relationship between traditional libraries and shadow libraries deserves closer scrutiny, especially given cases like in Ireland with Wiley, which highlight the potential role of shadow libraries as unofficial backup systems for conventional digital collections. The concept of “infrastructuring” in relation to shadow libraries could be further developed, particularly examining how these platforms continue to adapt their survival strategies through both technical means (domain multiplication) and social infrastructure (platform relationships). Finally, while this study focused on link structures rather than the number of links, future quantitative research could examine download patterns and user behavior across the shadow library network to better understand how the infrastructure is utilized in practice. Such investigations would enhance our understanding of how shadow libraries sustain themselves while navigating legal challenges and technical constraints.