[5] As access to printing in the Soviet Union was strictly controlled and censored, dissident intellectuals would hand-copy and retype manuscripts for secret circulation.

Librarians became especially active, using borrowed access passwords to download copies of scientific and scholarly articles from Western Internet sources, then uploading them to RuNet.

As of August 2024, the project, whose website was experiencing temporary outages and technical errors, appeared to no longer be actively managed and its lead programmer was reported to be "inactive".

[14] In mid-December 2024, as the majority of Library Genesis domains were seized or disabled through legal action from a group of publishers led by Pearson Education, the German consortium Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet [de] (CUII), composed of copyright holder groups and internet service providers, also instituted a country-wide blocking order against Library Genesis at the request of publishers whose names were redacted.

[15][16] On June 3, 2015, Library Genesis (along with the creator of Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan) was sued by Elsevier, the academic division of the third-largest publishing group by worldwide revenue in 2014.

[25] On March 1, 2024, the publishers requested a default judgment and an injunction compelling the gateway providers IPFS, Pinata Technologies and Cloudflare to deny services to Library Genesis.

[4] It is also blocked by ISPs in France,[30] Germany,[31] Greece,[32] Italy,[33] Belgium (which redirects to the Belgian Federal Police blockpage),[34] and Russia (in November 2018).

[35][36] On March 23, 2024, the Dutch pirate site blocklist has been reported to now include Anna's Archive and Library Genesis, based on a request by BREIN, a local anti-piracy group.