Sci-Hub and Libgen descend from a Soviet tradition of smuggled science

Today's enormous shadow libraries — Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, and the rest — trace back to Soviet samizdat, the underground practice of typing forbidden books onto carbon paper and passing the copies hand to hand. Russian scholars who grew up inside that culture started digitizing texts in the 1990s, and the through-line from clandestine typewriters to today's gigantic online archives is direct. — Read the rest The post Sci-Hub and Libgen descend from a Soviet tradition of smuggled science appeared first on Boing Boing.