Webinar: Shadow Libraries and Access to Knowledge: Origins, Policies, Legality, and Accessibility | May 12, 2022

"Large segments of the scholarly literature, both from backlist catalogs and new publications, continue to be only accessible behind paywall infrastructures. This poses a challenge to those scholars not affiliated with well funded research institutions, in particular in the Global South, exacerbating extant inequities. At the same time, the often cumbersome user interfaces of paywall-protected platforms continue to prevent efficient usage by researchers who do happen to have access to these materials. As a result, an ecosystem of so-called “shadow libraries” has evolved, developing different strategies to make closed content accessible to a wide scholarly public. Contrary to for example the music and movie industries, the academic publishing industry has been unable to formulate a platform solution that would provide an alternative. This OASPA webinar will address the origins and architecture of these forms of widely used online repositories, their position in relation to Open Access policies, legal aspects in terms of copyright and fair use, and what they can teach us in terms of accessibility. The webinar will be chaired by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei (punctum books) and we welcome panelists Arul George Scaria (National Law University Delhi), Martin Paul Eve (Birkbeck), Marcell Mars (Memory of the World, Pirate Care) and Balász Bodó (University of Amsterdam). Please join us live for this free webinar and contribute to the discussion and the guidelines for open access publishers.  Link to registration page: bit.ly/May22-OASPAWebinar.  Please share with your networks. Panelist biographies Balázs Bodó, PhD, economist, socio-legal researcher at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam. He was a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society in 2006/7 and a Fellow at the Center between 2006 and 2012. In 2012/13 he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. In 2013 he moved to Amsterdam as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam. His academic interests include copyright and economics, piracy, media regulation, peer-to-peer communities, shadow libraries, digital archives, informal media economies, and similar regulatory conflicts around new technological architectures. https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/b/o/b.bodo/b.bodo.html?cb   Martin Paul Eve-  Martin has appeared before the UK House of Commons Select Committee BIS Inquiry into Open Access, and been a steering-group member of the OAPEN-UK project, the Jisc National Monograph Strategy Group, the SCONUL Strategy Group on Academic Content and Communications, and the HEFCE Open Access Monographs Expert Reference Panel (2014), and the Universities UK OA Monographs Working Group (2016-). Martin is also an Executive Board Officer for punctum books, a Plan S Ambassador, and he co-founded the Open Library of Humanities. He is currently a work package lead on the COPIM project. Marcell Mars is a free software advocate, cultural explorer, and social instigator. Marcell is one of the founders of Multimedial Institute – mi2 and net.culture club mama in Zagreb. He initiated GNU GPL publishing label ‘ EGOBOO.bits, TamTam platform for on-line collaboration, Ngode software for NGOs financial management.  https://monoskop.org/Marcell_Mars Arul Dr Arul George Scaria is an Associate Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property and Competition (CIIPC) at National Law University, Delhi. He is also an Affiliate Faculty of the CopyrightX programme, offered under the auspices of the Harvard Law School. Arul did his doctoral research at the International Max Planck Research School for Competition and Innovation (IMPRS-CI), Munich. His post-doctoral research was at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium. Arul has also worked as a CSIR-NIF Fellow in the IP management division of the National Innovation Foundation, India. Arul has two sole-authored books to his credit – Piracy in the Indian Film Industry: Copyright and Cultural Consonance (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Ambush Marketing: Game within a Game (Oxford University Press, 2008). He has also contributed to different international journals and books by drawing from his research. He also contributes regularly to policy making. Most recently, he was the co-chair of a thematic group constituted by the Principal Scientific Advisor and the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, for drafting the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (STIP 2020) of India and this group looked at the issue of access to knowledge and resources.  ..."