Others assert that academic publishers unfairly benefit from government-funded research, written by researchers, many of whom are employed by public universities, and that Libgen is helping to disseminate research that should be freely available in the first place. Publishers like Elsevier have accused Library Genesis of internet piracy. Libgen provides access to copyrighted works, such as PDFs of content from Elsevier's ScienceDirect web-portal.
Libgen describes itself as a 'links aggregator', providing a searchable database of items 'collected from publicly available public Internet resources' as well as files uploaded 'from users'. The site enables free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere. Library Genesis ( Libgen) is a file-sharing based shadow library website for scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines. Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clients.
