"In the Shadows: Academic Knowledge and Remedial Action" - Lucas Miotto (University of Surrey) & Himani Bhakuni (University of York)

Free and Equal, 2026

By Lucas Miotto and Himani Bhakuni

When shadow-library giant Library Genesis temporarily went offline in August 2024, it triggered an immediate panic across online discussion groups. Amid the flurry of “Is it really down?” and “Are there alternative ways to access it?” one Facebook reply laid bare the harsh reality of academic inequity:

“It’s down, yes. If it remains down permanently, I think I’ll need to find a new career or a job in the global north. Or just never read any new books from now on.”

For countless researchers worldwide, academic access is not a given. For them, access is possible only thanks to shadow libraries and anonymous sharing networks. However, because these platforms violate copyright and licensing restrictions, they operate illegally and face frequent blocks and takedowns.

In our paper In the Shadows: Academic Knowledge and Remedial Action, we discuss the moral permissibility of sharing academic research illegally. While the practice appears to be highly endorsed (at least informally) by academics, we provide a more systematic case for its justification. We show that the actions of shadow libraries and open-access activists provide a good illustration of the ethics of unilateral remedial action, which differs in important respects from the ethics of political disobedience and deserves specific treatment.

Why does the practice need justifying at all?

Many academics express informal sympathy for illegal sharing. But this does not eliminate the question of whether it is a practice that requires justification. What we need to know is whether there is something genuinely wrong with it; some moral consideration weighty enough to ground the actions of publishers and the courts that order shadow libraries to be blocked and taken down. So, the real question is whether illegal sharing breaches important moral considerations. We think it engages at least four, which are all, in one way or another, tied to copyright and licensing restrictions: first, that the practice breaks the law; second, that it may undermine the interests copyright is meant to protect, such as authors’ creative work, attribution, and a fair reward for their efforts; third, that it interferes with the contractual agreements that authors enter into with publishers; and fourth, that it may erode the coordinating role that the copyright system, imperfect as it is, plays for scholars, libraries, and funders who have organised their activities around it. Each of these gives illegal sharing a case to answer.

The first consideration – that it simply breaks the law – is one that many reach for in debates around law-breaking, usually via a general duty to obey the law: the idea that in a reasonably just society we have a standing pro tanto obligation to obey the law simply because it is the law. We deliberately do not build our case on this. For one, we are sceptical that any such general duty exists; the objections to it are strong and, to our minds, largely persuasive. For another, orienting the whole debate around the duty to obey would prove far too much: given how vulnerable that duty is to objections, resting permissibility on it would make almost any act of law-breaking easy to justify — illegal sharing included — and a victory won that cheaply is perhaps not worth having.

The more promising route, and the one we favour in the paper, is to set the general duty aside and look instead at the specific considerations that give particular laws their moral force. Even with no blanket duty to obey, there are good reasons to take copyright seriously: it protects interests that matter, structures the agreements authors make with publishers, and underpins a system of dissemination that the academic community relies on. Breaching it is therefore not morally trivial. Of course, none of this makes copyright sacrosanct. What it shows is that illegal sharing genuinely calls for justification. The rest of the paper tries to provide such justification.

Not Disobedience, but Remedy

How should we understand what shadow libraries are doing? The most natural answer, and the one open-access activists, such as Aaron Swartz, themselves have reached for, is civil disobedience. In his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, Swartz placed the movement squarely within “the grand tradition of civil disobedience”.

We think, however, that this characterisation is inaccurate. Civil disobedience (and political disobedience more generally) is essentially communicative. It is a public act addressed to the political community: it aims to voice a wrong, to appeal to a shared sense of justice, and to persuade a majority to change the law. Its whole character is dialogical. But this is not what shadow libraries do. They operate covertly and anonymously; they do not try to send a message, engage with the reasons of public actors, or shame anyone into reform. Their aim is more direct: to put a good that is being unjustly withheld straight into the hands of the people denied it. Nor does broadening the label to “uncivil disobedience” help. Accounts of that kind — Candice Delmas’s, for instance[i] — rightly recognise that principled lawbreaking can be covert, disruptive, or coercive. But the category casts its net too wide: it bundles together acts as different as offensive protest, vigilantism, and running an underground abortion network, as though they raise the same moral questions. They don’t, and treating them as a single phenomenon (i.e. uncivil disobedience) blurs important distinctions. (We say more about this in the paper’s section II.)

What shadow libraries are doing belongs to a different moral category altogether, one we call unilateral remedial action: lawbreaking that aims not to persuade institutions but to directly repair an injustice those institutions have failed to fix. Its natural companions are cases like maintaining underground abortion networks where access is denied, breaking a blockade to deliver medicine, or redistributive theft. Separating such acts from acts of political disobedience (civil or uncivil) matters because acts of this kind answer to a different set of justificatory conditions: ones closer to the ethics of defensive or rescue action than to the ethics of dissent. On our account, an act of unilateral remedial action is permissible only if it (a) responds to a real injustice, (b) genuinely remedies it, (c) is necessary, and (d) is proportionate. The paper works through these four conditions in detail.

Response to a Real Injustice

The first condition asks whether there is a real injustice to remedy. Here the answer is “Yes”. Access to academic research is restricted mainly through price, and those prices are not incidental. They are set within a publishing market dominated by a small number of large commercial firms (e.g., Elsevier is alone responsible for 17% of the global articles published)[ii], which sell access to work that is largely funded by the public and is produced, edited, and peer-reviewed by academics. We do not deny that publishers provide real services. They help with hosting, formatting, archiving, and managing submissions, amongst other things. These services, however, do not explain the scale of the fees charged to universities and libraries.

The problem, then, is not that academic research may never be priced. Some costs may be justified (though, of course, there is a further question about the just allocation of such costs). The problem is that current pricing practices impose disproportionate and avoidable barriers to participation in academic life. Those barriers, we explain in the paper, produce three connected injustices: they violate a defeasible right to access knowledge; they marginalize research communities that cannot afford full participation, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs); and they give rise to epistemic injustices.

The Remedial Condition

The remedial condition asks for more than good intentions: the act must not simply protest injustice, but actually deliver the good that is being withheld. This is where unilateral remedial action shows its teeth. Contrasting sharing academic research illegally with two other practices may help us illustrate this point.

Consider first redistributive theft (i.e., Robin Hood-like cases). It too aims at remedying a real injustice. However, it is harder to justify, because taking money from one person to give to another deprives the first of something, and whether such unilateral redistribution actually remedies anything is both contested and empirically uncertain (see, pp 270-271). Illegal sharing of academic research is different: digital duplication (much like photocopying) an article doesn’t take it away from anyone, and it puts the withheld good directly into the hands of those denied it. On the remedial test, it does much better.

The second contrast cuts against shadow libraries. Many of them don’t restrict themselves to sharing academic research; they also share trade books, fiction, and other cultural works. But the case we have made is specifically about academic knowledge, and it does not automatically extend to these other materials (many of which are primarily for entertainment purposes). The relevant injustice and the interests at stake may simply be different: the deprivation that makes restricting research an injustice is not obviously present when what is shared is a novel, so a separate argument would be needed. Besides, at face value, it is not clear that depriving someone from certain forms of entertainment is an injustice that needs remedying. The remedial condition, therefore, allows us to justify the sharing of academic knowledge, but it does not hand shadow libraries a blanket permission for everything they happen to host.

Necessity

For illegal sharing to be necessary, there must be no less harmful alternative that is both feasible and just as remedial. We consider four main alternatives — the “gold” and “green” routes to open access, public libraries and inter-library loans, sharing pre-prints through academic networks, and wholesale reform of publishing. We then argue that none of them clears the bar. The golden route, the model formally favoured by many journals and funders, actually compounds the problem, as it funds open access through article processing charges (APCs) that can run into thousands of dollars per paper, paid on top of existing subscriptions, and is out of reach for LMIC researchers and for researchers without an institutional affiliation. Both the gold and green routes are also radically incomplete: they do little for older research, or for work by authors who are unwilling or unable to publish via these routes.

Nor do public libraries, inter-library loans, or academic networks solve the problem. Public libraries are themselves constrained by budgets and licensing agreements, and in many cases users must be physically present to access subscription databases. Inter-library agreements are valuable, but they are often limited to physical collections and commonly exclude online databases and e-books. Private academic networks such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and SSRN help in some cases, but they are incomplete (e.g., they do not allow for the sharing of books), uneven, and dependent on what authors choose or are able to upload. They also do not reliably provide access to the final, peer-reviewed version of the record. These routes, we argue, are better than nothing, but they still leave a large portion of the injustices unremedied (and sometimes compound them).

Reform is welcome but slow, and it is no answer to a researcher who needs an article today to carry on their research. Shadow libraries, by contrast, already deliver immediate and near-universal access; their continued existence under sustained legal pressure is itself evidence of how feasible they are. (We develop these comparisons in detail in the paper.)

Proportionality

Finally, the harms. Here a distinction matters: between the harm done to those responsible for the injustice (publishers, states) and the harm done to those who aren’t, or are only marginally so (individual authors, third parties).

Here our arguments supported a somewhat counter-intuitive conclusion. One might expect the lone academic emailing her own paper to a colleague to be on the safest moral ground, and a sprawling shadow library to be on the shakiest. We argue that it can be the other way around. The individual author is a party to the publishing contract she is breaching, so she carries promissory obligations that a shadow library – a third party to that contract – never undertook; and she shoulders personal legal and professional risks from which the library’s anonymity insulates it. The intuitively “small” act can therefore be harder to justify than the large one.

The broader picture, however, favours illegal sharing. Most authors are barely harmed at all: few earn meaningful royalties from research, most are salaried to produce it, and there is evidence that freely circulating work through shadow libraries actually increases citations, which serves authors’ interests. As for the publishers themselves, it is far from clear that they are meaningfully harmed. The decisive point is empirical: shadow libraries have operated at scale for some fifteen years, and academic publishing has not collapsed into disorder. On the contrary, major publishers have gone on to posting record profits in the last few years, which puts pressure on the claim that illegal sharing is doing them grave damage.

Conclusion: The Remedial Gap

Illegal sharing of academic research responds to a real injustice, genuinely remedies it, is necessary, and is proportionate — and, perhaps surprisingly, it is often compatible with the very values copyright is supposed to serve. On those grounds, we conclude that it is morally permissible.

There is a further thought we want readers to take away. Shadow libraries do not merely break rules; in delivering the goods, they also expose what we call a “remedial gap”. By showing that academic knowledge can be made immediately available and at scale, they demonstrate that the deprivation was never inevitable. The barriers that keep research out of reach are not a fact of nature. They are sustained by lagging institutions and extractive actors who could make this knowledge available on fair terms but insist on refusing to do so. Justified unilateral remedial action thus has a diagnostic value beyond the relief it provides: it reveals which injustices persist primarily because no one with the power to fix them has chosen to.

Permissibility is not obligation, and we stop short of insisting that everyone ought to share — though we think that open access activists, like Aaron Swartz and Alexandra Elbakyan, who supported a duty to share academic knowledge may well have been right. We also think that illegal sharing is a provisional remedy: it can patch the gap, but it cannot close it. Closing it means repairing the deeper injustices that plague academic publishing — the unpaid labour, the double payment for publicly funded work, the oligopoly. Repairing such injustices, we claim, calls for a different kind of responsibility, one that falls partly on us as researchers. It is exercised in ordinary professional choices: publishing in diamond open-access journals (even when they are less prestigious), prioritising reviewing for them, joining their editorial boards, declining exploitative review requests where we can, and lending our prestige to non-extractive publishing models. These steps are modest on their own, but together they are how remedial action becomes remedial reform. The aim, ultimately, should be to make shadow libraries unnecessary.

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[i] Candice Delmas, A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil (Oxford University Press, 2018).

[ii] About,” Elsevier, accessed January 31, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20250131232938/https://www.elsevier.com/about