Shadow libraries: access to educational materials in global higher education

This collection looks at how university students in Russia, Argentina, South Africa, Poland, Brazil, India, and Uruguay get the books and articles they need for their education. The death of Aaron Swartz and the more recent controversy around the SciHub and Libgen repositories have drawn attention to the question of access to knowledge, particularly for students facing financial and other constraints. Open access currently provides a very limited answer to this question, which piracy answers more comprehensively. This edited volume explores how access to knowledge has changed in the past twenty years, as student populations have boomed and as educators and publishers navigated the transition from paper to digital materials. It is concerned primarily with the experience of developing countries, where growing numbers of students, rapid development of Internet and device infrastructures, and high relative inequality have produced the sharpest tensions in the publishing and educational ecosystem.

The Russian origins of the online shadow library / Balázs Bodó -- In the shadow of the gigapedia / Balázs Bodó -- Argentina: a student-made ecosystem in an era of state retreat / Evelin Heidel -- Access to learning resources in post-apartheid South Africa / Eve Gray and Laura Czerniewicz -- Poland: where the state ends, the hamster begins / Alek Tarkowski and Miroslaw Filiciak -- India: the knowledge thief / Lawrence Liang -- Brazil: the copy shop and the cloud / Pedro Mizukami and Jhessica Reia -- Coda: Uruguay / Jorge Gemetto and Mariana Fossatti.