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Library Genesis Charitable Seeding Project

In November 2019 reddit user shrine asked the communities /r/seedboxes and /r/DataHoarder to consider supporting two of the most important library collections in history- not with money, but with their bandwidth. By December thousands of seeders were active on torrents for more than 2.4 million books, and by January the Sci-Hub collection was safe.

The effort to protect these libraries has been covered in TorrentFreak, Vice, and Gizmodo.

Once Sci-Hub was seeded, we put the archive to work to create an experimental, curated Coronavirus research capsule spanning decades, perhaps the first of its kind (covered in Vice).

Next, we successfully petitioned publishers to unlock their COVID-19 paywalls, a direct action movement that resulted in responses from Elsevier, Spring, and Wiley, and helped lead the way to the The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's backing of open access to Coronavirus science.

On May 7 2021, Sci-Hub's Alexandra Elbakyan revealed that the FBI has been wiretapping her accounts for over 2 years. This news comes after Twitter silenced the official Sci_Hub Twitter account in order to silence the Indian academics who were speaking out against Elsevier.

In support of Sci-Hub in their time of need, we called for a Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub and Open Science: "We are the library." The call was heard around the world and translated into multiple languages for a de-centralized global community effort. The Electronic Frontier Foundation celebrated the Rescue Mission, writing Activists Mobilize to Fight Censorship and Save Open Science: "Major publishers want to censor research-sharing resource Sci-Hub from the internet, but archivists are quickly responding to make that impossible."

How can I help seed the torrents?

You can join the Library Genesis Seeding Project to help seed the torrents that serve to preserve and archive the 2.5-million books in the library collection. PhillM's LibGen torrent index tracks which torrents need seeders, start there.

How do the torrents work?

The torrents are divided into three collections: scitech, fiction, and scimag. The book files and SQL databases together make up the library, so distributing these torrents means anyone in the world can create a mirror of Library Genesis. The SQL database files contain the file extension, book names, authors, and all other meta information.

  • scitech spans 3 million books packaged into 2,400+ torrents, with each torrent containing 1,000 books. Each scitech book file is named for its MD5 hash string.
  • fiction spans 2.4 million books packaged into 1,000 torrents, with each torrent containing 1,000 books. Each fiction book file is named for its MD5 hash string. Fiction SQL databases are divided into Russian and Foreign language (i.e. all languages other than Russian).
  • scimag spans 85 million scientific articles packaged into 850+ torrents, with each torrent containing 100 zip files. Each scientific article is named for its DOI.

How do the SQL databases work?

You can download the SQL databases from the various mirrors. Open them using MySQL or other equivalent software.