When Ananya Ray was an undergraduate at Jadavpur University in 2019, she discovered what seemed like academic gold: a Facebook group that could help her find any book she needed. As an English literature student writing papers on a tight budget, this was revolutionary.
She was looking for a particular book she couldn't afford to buy. Within hours of posting in the group, she had received a PDF from another member. On another occasion, she needed Chitrita Banerjee's 'A Taste of Our Times' – a book about food and Bengali culture that seemed impossible to find. Sure enough, someone on the group managed to find a copy.
“I got a lot of our course books from there as well, especially critical editions that were both very expensive and hard to find,” she said.
At last check, this Facebook group, which is one of the largest of its kind, had more than 115,000 members, spread across dozens of countries. The highest number of people in the group, according to admins, are from the United States and India. The group operates on trust, helping members find and share free electronic copies of of rare and unaffordable books (both academic and non-academic), articles, and journal papers while carefully avoiding copyright claims.
While any member, from anywhere, can help out if they happen to have what the seeker needs, the group was initially created with one specific purpose: for people from the Global South, especially South Asia, to ask for help from those who had access to education institutions in the Global North.
“The impulse to start the group was both self-serving as well as altruistic,” explained A*, a PhD student in Canada and one of the admins of the group currently. “Back in 2015 and 2016, there were two or three much smaller groups, one of which I had set up. We just ended up merging into the biggest, the most vocal one around 2017.”
A first realised the problem when they returned to India from university in Canada and found their access to the university library system blocked. "I remember how shocking it was to suddenly completely be cut off from all these resources," they said.
Perhaps this explains why membership of the group exploded during the pandemic, climbing to over 100,000 within a few months, as people were cut off from campuses and lost access to institutional libraries, archives, and subscriptions. For thousands of scholars – especially those in parts of the world which didn’t have high-end infrastructure or access in the first place – this meant being forced to try and find alternative ways to continue their education and research.
In order to join the group, potential members have to answer three questions, one of which is whether they believe in free access to knowledge. This is the only criteria, said P*, one of the admins, based on which a member could be denied membership.
Based in Delhi, P is a researcher at a premier national university. He said he has not only benefitted by finding material through the group, but also found a global community of like-minded people.
“People from South Asia are very active in the group as they want to help their fellow academic communities take part in the knowledge transfer,” he said. “There are a bunch of active uploaders who take out time to do labour and respond to requests for material, without getting anything in return.”
He likened the group to both an informal knowledge network and an archiving project of rare materials – a shadow library similar to UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme, which is an attempt to protect knowledge from collective amnesia.
The group maintains an odd number of admins – currently five – to ensure someone will always have a deciding vote on difficult matters. The primary focus of everyone involved has always been to protect the group. In the early days, they even tried not to add each other as ‘friends’ on the platform due to fear of the group being ‘Zucced’ – an Internet slang for being banned or deleted from the platform.
“As an admin, we are always fighting Facebook, when the real problem is not related to Facebook at all but to the free availability of scholarship,” said A.
When Research Costs More Than A Month’s Salary
The system that necessitates such groups is complex. The world of academic publishing has long been a battleground. Scholars have criticised the system as broken, and many now see themselves as modern-day Robin Hoods, fighting to free their own research from expensive paywalls.
Meanwhile, getting research published is a long, winding journey. First, a researcher submits their work to academic journals, often facing multiple rejections. If accepted, the paper goes through peer review, where other experts check everything from the quality of arguments to the accuracy of data. Then comes a round of revisions, followed by editing to match the journal's style. Only after all these steps – which can take months – does the paper finally get published.
The gatekeepers of this process are publishing giants like Nature and Elsevier, prestigious university presses like Oxford and Cambridge, and academic publishers like Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge. These companies control access to most scholarly research worldwide.
"Academic publishing is not to make money – it's a professional requirement,” said Mumbai-based English-language copy editor Shreya Bardhan. “You need a certain number of international publications in certain journals with a ‘minimum impact factor’ to get jobs.”
In fact, sometimes the author has to pay the journal to get their article published – especially if they want the article to be ‘open access.’
In an open journal, all articles are available for everyone to read without payment, which means the author has to pay to get it published. Often, universities in the global north will have grants specifically set aside to pay these fees, which can be huge – ranging anywhere from a thousand to 5,000 or even 10,000 USD, said some scholars. The other alternatives are closed journals – where readers pay subscription fees, while the authors of the papers get paid nothing.
And then there are for-profit sites such as academia.edu and social networking sites such as ResearchGate, on which many scholars upload abstracts or sections of their papers to get eyeballs on them.
Many such websites need to be first subscribed to before getting full or partial access to papers, pointed out Torsa Ghosal, associate professor of English, California State University Sacramento. This includes ResearchGate, that needs a recognised institute domain name to sign up although users can browse for free and request authors for access to their papers.
“I would argue that most researchers would prefer to publish in open access, as they are otherwise read less and cited less,” she said.
“Many people prefer for their work to just be out there, so there is a lot of grey literature online – stuff that is not published as part of book or journal,” said Bardhan. “You only get royalties if you are published as part of a book.”
Often, the work involved is almost completely unpaid – especially the writing and the peer-reviewing. Editors associated with the publishers, especially the ones that have trade verticals, do get paid, although given that most academic presses work with what stakeholders describe as a ‘shoestring budget’, the amount can be insignificant. Much of the funding, apart from user subscriptions for closed access journals, come from libraries that buy copies.
Ghosal recounted editing books for a major publisher and found out that the price for accessing even one of the chapters was close to a thousand dollars – a sum that is “almost out of the question for paying out of pocket,” and the only way to access would be through grants, or if the university pays for it through a subvention fees, which may not always be possible. It’s a “different kind of inequity in academia,” she said.
The Price Of Piracy
Online piracy has been a major thorn in the side of the publishing industry. In the United States alone, publishers lose about $300 million yearly to e-book piracy, according to a 2019 Forbes report. A Nielsen survey from 2017 put this figure at $315 million. In Italy, the losses were even higher – €771 million in 2021, although it’s unclear how much of this is from physical piracy and how much from online piracy. Academic publishers specifically might be losing up to 28% of their profits to piracy.
Some organisations are fighting back, such as the US-based Author’s Guild, which actively pursues legal action against piracy websites, successfully taking down a network called Kiss Library that they labeled a "criminal pirate network." In India, Penguin has partnered with LinkBusters to develop an anti-piracy tool.
But this anti-piracy argument only works if authors are actually making money from their work – which often isn't true in academic publishing.
Major publishers say they're not against open access – as long as it follows their rules. Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Sage, Taylor & Francis, Elsevier, and Nature all have public policies about open access publishing. But there's a catch: someone still has to pay.
Taylor & Francis, responding to questions about piracy, argued that "pirate sites have the potential to spread misinformation." They explained that unlike publishers, these sites "have no incentive to ensure the accuracy of the books and research articles they share, no incentive to ensure that it meets ethical standards, and no incentive to retract or correct if issues arise." It further added that organisations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics help publishers deal with such issues. It also mentioned the work publishers do to ensure that their published papers are ‘interlinked through systems such as CrossRef,’ helping to widen access to them legally.
The problem is, of course, the feasibility, when the major hurdle is a lack of resources to utilise this pathway, such as in universities in India, which is the gap that the Facebook group aims to fill.
The Legal Fight to Keep Knowledge Free
There have also been many, many court cases on the matter. The story of Aaron Swartz stands out as particularly significant. In 2013, the young American tech activist faced serious criminal charges for downloading thousands of academic papers from JSTOR, a subscription-based academic database to possibly distribute them freely with the public. Tragically, the pressure of the legal battle led to his suicide. Today, many view Swartz as a hero who fought for free access to knowledge in the digital age.
In India, a 2016 case brought hope to students. Major publishers like Oxford and Cambridge sued a small photocopy shop at the University of Delhi for copying textbooks for students. The court sided with Rameshwari Xerox Shop, ruling that copying materials for education was perfectly legal under Indian law. This decision was particularly important for India's education sector, where textbook sales had reached $5.3 billion by 2016.
The battle over Sci-Hub, often called the "Wikipedia of academic papers," has also made headlines. Founded by Alexandra Elbakyan from Kazakhstan, the site offers millions of research papers for free. Publishing giant Elsevier won a lawsuit against Sci-Hub in 2017. In the other case, the court ordered search engines to block the website but Sci-Hub continues to operate from Russia, constantly changing its web address to stay online.
A more recent case involved the Internet Archive, a digital library that lets people borrow e-books. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they removed waiting lists for their digital books to help people studying from home. Four major publishers sued them for this decision, and Internet Archive lost the case. The court ruled they should have asked the publishers' permission first.
Currently, another important case is unfolding in Delhi. Three big publishers are trying to block Sci-Hub and Library Genesis (LibGen) in India. These websites provide free access to academic materials that usually cost money. Seven researchers from Delhi universities have stepped in to defend these sites, arguing that blocking them would seriously hurt academic research in India. They point out that Indian law allows copying materials for educational purposes, and completely blocking these websites would be too extreme.
The impact on researchers in developing countries is significant. "As a scholar from the global south, I think that banning LibGen and Sci-Hub, and open-source public domain knowledge websites like them, could affect financially disadvantaged scholars a lot," said Ray. The scholar explained, "Many books aren't even available in India and South Asia. When they are, they're too expensive for most researchers, who don't earn much here."
Copyright lawyer Dahlia Sen Oberoi sees nuance in the debate. She said there is a difference in the case of online shadow libraries such as the group, and cases such as that of the Rameshwari Xerox Shop because the latter charged students, while the group is free. She pointed out that while free sharing for education might be acceptable, making money from copied materials isn't fair to the creators.
In the case of the xerox shop, the big five publishers did not approach the Supreme Court more because public opinion was against them, rather than because they did not have a legal basis for the case.
The lawyer has joined police raids on Mumbai street shops selling pirated books to students for 100 rupees each. She said she is also aware of cases of students and commercial sellers buying copies and selling it on websites such as Flipkart and Amazon, on which it is nearly impossible to gauge whether a copy is pirated or original. “It’s not just revenue deprivation to the publishers and authors, but the creation of a parallel economy due to encouragement of piracy,” she warned. “How do you know people are not making money from copies downloaded from shadow libraries?”
Oberoi suggested that if students cannot afford textbooks, then the curriculum should be changed and Indian books should be referred rather than foreign ones, or ensuring libraries are well-stocked.
But this brings us back to the original problem: lack of resources in institutions outside wealthy countries, made worse when libraries closed during the pandemic.
Alternative Models Of Revenue
While legal battles continue, researchers are finding creative solutions to share knowledge. One promising approach is the development of international library networks, according to Swayamjit Ray, a researcher at Cornell University who studies how plants and insects interact.
Ray pointed out a frustrating irony: researchers from developing countries who work in the US produce valuable research, but their home communities often can't access it. "Most of this research is done by international scholars, and there's a human cost to this," he explained. "Why shouldn't their communities back home benefit from their work?"
He further pointed out that in the United States taxpayers fund much of the scientific research, yet many citizens can't access the results they helped pay for. However, universities there have found a partial solution through inter-library loan (ILL) systems, where universities share resources with each other.
In fact, many universities in India already use ILL – a swift Google search returns the presence of ILLs at Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Jamia Millia Islamia, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Ashoka University, Nalanda University, The M S University of Baroda, the Institute Of Aeronautical Engineering in Hyderabad, O. P. Jindal Global University and Symbiosis International.
All of these are partners with the Developing Library Network (DELNET), a ‘resource sharing library network’ registered as a society in 1992 and now operating under the aegis of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. It connects thousands of institutions in India for inter-institute loans, although at least one of those institutions – IIT-Delhi – asks the user to bear some charges such as those for mailing the material.
Ray envisions a worldwide network where researchers anywhere could borrow materials from libraries everywhere. "International libraries could work together," he suggested. "For example, universities abroad could partner with India's National Library in Kolkata or with institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology."
This is something which DELNET is working towards. Besides India, it has members in eight countries, including Bhutan, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Oman, Philippines, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates and the United States. However, there's still a barrier: institutions must pay membership fees (about Rs. 16,500 plus tax for new members, and Rs. 11,500 plus tax yearly to renew).
For Ananya Ray, one of the ways to access material was to go to bookshops that allow you to sit and read, such as Seagull Books, Hawakal Publishers, Aakar Books, Leftword Books and Mayday Bookstore. For many smaller authors, she tries to either buy their books, write in to them for access to papers should they happen to be able to provide it, or at least ask for consent before accessing copies online.
Ultimately, it’s the once unknown and now hugely popular Facebook group alongwith similar but much smaller groups on Telegram that have become a repository of knowledge and material for her.
“The core principle is that knowledge shouldn’t be behind a paywall for anyone, and that it should be free, accessible and publicly available,” she said. "That's the very basis of education."
“Whatever people do, new things will keep coming up,” emphasised P. “Even if the Facebook community goes down, it will come up somewhere else. There is no way to restrict knowledge.”