In 2011, Elbakyan launched Sci-Hub, a search and download service for journal articles. Sci-Hub was connected to LibGen, which by then had grown into a mostly academic, mostly unauthorized archive of over half a million books and articles. By most accounts, Elbakyan's innovation was to mobilize university colleagues to share not individual articles, but "virtual private network" credentials for campus intranets in Western universities, which enabled access to the major journal databases.The core method was simple but ingenious. On Sci-Hub, a search for an article triggered a search of LibGen. If the article wasn't found in LibGen, Sci-Hub searched the major journal databases using the acquired credentials. When the user downloaded Joe Karaganis 2 Joe Karaganis a copy, Sci-Hub simultaneously uploaded a copy to LibGen, ensuring that the next request for the document could be met from within the collection. By 2016, Sci-Hub/LibGen had grown to around fifty million articles. Over a six-month period in 2015-2016, it had over 28 million downloads (Bohannon 2016).Because Sci-Hub circumvented the paywalls on which much of the scientific publishing world was built, the major publishers were eager to shut it down. In late 2015, Elsevier, whose ScienceDirect database was a major source for Sci-Hub, obtained an injunction in a U.S. court targeting the service, LibGen, several other unauthorized book archives, and Elbakyan personally-one of the only publicly identified individuals in this world of shadow libraries. In early 2017, the outcome was still uncertain: Sci-Hub had been forced to switch domains twice and had disabled its direct search capabilities. The LibGen site had been up and down several times in the preceding year. Although the Russian services that hosted Sci-Hub and LibGen remain relatively insulated from U.S. injunctions, the sites depend on other parts of the Internet that are more vulnerable to legal pressure-domain name registrars, search engines, and Internet service providers especially. When these companies comply with injunctions, they can make life difficult, though rarely impossible, for the targeted services.As everyone from Elbakyan to Elsevier knew, however, Sci-Hub's importance was not its permanence as a service but its status as a proof of concept. Its core archive of fifty million articles was freely available and its basic search and archive features easily replicated. Elbakyan herself estimated that the full archive has been copied many times, moving well beyond the network of Russian academics and hackers who formed the core community behind LibGen and many of the other top-level archives. Although Elbakyan made no significant effort to hide her identity and may face arrest on charges of copyright infringement, the larger network of pirate archivists behind the other services has kept a much lower profile.The Sci-Hub story made headlines as the authors and researchers involved in this book were wrapping up our study of this rapidly changing knowledge ecosystem.Shadow Libraries explores thi...