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Introducing a new series in our blog and emails, OIDA Researchers Share! We hope this showcase of how scholars, students, journalists, policymakers, advocates and others are using OIDA resources will inspire future work.
Maud Bernisson, postdoctoral fellow at LISIS (Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés), CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), Université Gustave Eiffel (Paris, France)
How do you use OIDA in your teaching, research, or advocacy? In terms of research, I find the OIDA an invaluable resource. The diversity and massive amount of documents in the OIDA have been particularly helpful for me to develop different approaches to examine publication planning in detail. For example, with colleagues, we have found documents like contracts and publications to study how a pharmaceutical company like Mallinckrodt implement publication planning. The OIDA has also helped me to identify types of documents needed for publication planning, like publication guidelines, that I could then gather from other sources as well to further study the ethics of publication planning. The OIDA is thus an essential resource to research this topic.
What advice would you give to people new to OIDA? In my experience, using serendipity to dive into the database helped to learn about the opioid manufacturers, their internal organisation and communications. It also helped find unexpected information, like contracts or drafts of publications. Serendipity is however not always a viable option since it requires time. For users who cannot afford it, I would advise them to start by reading the documentation provided by the OIDA and learn about the role of these companies in the opioid crisis, and what has already been documented thanks to this database. The advantages of the OIDA are not only the massive amount of data and the available documentation but also its structure and the search criteria available. The database indeed permits users to explore the bowels of several companies, which includes its internal organisation, communications, and work topics. This information provides a context essential to then focus on a specific inquiry.
The Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) is hosting a national symposium, Tuesday, May 6 through Thursday, May 8, noon-2:30 PM (ET) / 9:00 AM-11:30 AM (PT). This unique virtual symposium offers a series of complementary panels that demonstrates OIDA’s value in addressing fundamental questions of importance to historians, health policy and legal experts, journalists, archivists and people with lived experience.
Dates: Tuesday, May 6 through Thursday, May 8 – each day noon to 2:30 PM ET (9:00 AM-11:30 AM PT)
Day 1: Health Journalism, Law and Policy (Tuesday, May 6) This group of experts will discuss the role of journalism and storytelling in the development of laws and policies designed to prevent further harms from the opioid crisis, and the critical role of document disclosure as a means to improve public health.
Day 2: Information Science (Wednesday, May 7) In the digital age, organizational records are being produced on a scale that dwarfs earlier archives of institutional records. Speakers will talk about the challenges and opportunities of managing and providing access to massive digital collections like OIDA.
Day 3: Histories and Stories of the Opioid Crisis (Thursday, May 8) This interdisciplinary panel will explore the ways in which OIDA collections serve as an important resource for looking back and looking forward, telling new stories and developing new analyses about the worst drug epidemic in U.S. history.
For more details on speakers and how to register, please visit https://oida-resources.jhu.edu/oida-national-symposium-2025/.
OIDA staff added over 220,000 documents to the Teva and Allergan Documents. This batch brings the collection to more than 1.7 million documents and includes training materials, marketing communications, and more.
The Teva and Allergan collection will encompass about 1.9 million documents when complete. Processed documents are being made public on a rolling basis with monthly releases expected through 2025.
This month, IDL staff added over 200,000 documents produced by the Settling States in the multistate litigation against Juul Labs. When complete, the Juul Labs collection will contain approximately 7 million documents. IDL is working through the files as quickly as possible and will post new documents every month.
North Carolina Juul Labs Collection18,000 new files have been added to the Juul Labs Collection under the State of North Carolina sub-collection. These materials represent some of the final batches to be processed from the North Carolina settlement agreement.
Explore the new NC Juul Labs Research Guide!
UNC Libraries has created a comprehensive research guide to help you navigate the Juul Labs documents from the North Carolina settlement. This guide provides insight into the origins of the Juul Collection, covering the history of Juul Labs, the NC litigation, and key themes found in the documents. Whether you're researching industry practices, public health impacts, or legal actions, this resource is full of information to get you started.
A team at the Climate Litigation Lab at the University of Oxford Sustainable Law Programme has built a free AI research assistant using our fossil fuel industry documents! The Climate Accountability Research Assistant (CLARA) uses large language models and the latest techniques in information retrieval to interrogate large collections of litigation-relevant historical documents, opening new possibilities for research.
Read more about it in this LinkedIn post.
Please follow us @ucsf-industrydocs.bsky.social for updates about new documents and events. We also continue to post to LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Twitter/X to stay connected with our research community wherever they are.
We’re busy updating our IDL website, which will launch later this year with a more modern design, faster performance, and better compatibility with mobile devices. As part of this work, we’re collecting feedback from people who use our website.
If you’re interested in taking part in this user research, please email us at industrydocuments@ucsf.edu. Your feedback will be invaluable in helping us make our website easy to navigate for all our users.
Introducing a new series in our blog and emails, OIDA Researchers Share! We hope this showcase of how scholars, students, journalists, policymakers, advocates and others are using OIDA resources will inspire future work.
Dorie Apollonio, Professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco
How do you use OIDA in your teaching, research, or advocacy? I’ve been working with the Opioid Industry Documents Archive since its inception (technically even before that, when the first 503 documents were still held in the Drug Industry Documents Archive). Most of my involvement is a combination of teaching and research; two PharmD students I was advising on their capstone research project used those 503 documents to write the first peer-reviewed articles based on OIDA. Since then, I’ve worked with multiple PharmD student groups who’ve written capstone research projects using OIDA, on topics including industry marketing of opioids by using key opinion leaders, opioid marketing strategies that targeted veterans and children, pharmacies’ opioid dispensing practices, and more. Most recently, my team was awarded a five-year grant by the National Institutes of Health (R01DA058687) that relies on OIDA to assess how best to regulate addictive medications.
What advice would you give to people new to OIDA? I’ve learned from working with students that working with industry documents is not intuitive for most people. It’s easier to understand how to use them by attending one of the annual workshops run by the UCSF library, reading the materials on the “New to the Archive?” tab, and possibly meeting with someone who has more experience to get help.
Ravi Gupta, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
How do you use OIDA in your teaching, research, or advocacy? I am a physician and health policy researcher interested in examining how private entities influence public health, with a particular focus on addiction, including the opioid crisis. Over the past few years, I have been a frequent user of OIDA for both research and teaching. My research has involved in-depth exploration of OIDA to analyze how the opioid industry misused science to promote the safety and effectiveness of prescription opioids. In ongoing work, I am leveraging these materials to investigate the roles of key stakeholders – such as key opinion leaders and medical science liaisons – in shaping the opioid epidemic. Additionally, I have incorporated specific documents into lectures for medical students, using them to illustrate how physicians themselves may be targeted by industry efforts to influence prescribing or promotion of certain therapeutics.
What advice would you give to people new to OIDA? OIDA is an invaluable resource for understanding industry’s role in shaping the opioid crisis. Whether using it for research, journalism, teaching, advocacy, or other purposes, it is essential to become familiar with the archives. A variety of curated documents are available to help users navigate the different collections and apply tools for mining information effectively in OIDA. For those new to OIDA, I recommend taking time to explore the available orientation materials and experimenting with different search strategies. Starting with broad searches can help develop a sense of the available documents, but eventually, narrowing the focus by using specific keywords, filtering by date, or exploring particular industry actors can yield more meaningful insights. Engaging with others who have experience using OIDA—whether through workshops, forums, or colleagues—can also provide valuable guidance on making the most of this rich and ever-evolving resource. Ultimately, OIDA is a dynamic and ever-evolving collection of critical industry documents, making it a powerful tool for deepening our understanding of the opioid crisis.
Opioid Industry Documents Archive
Teva and Allergan Documents
OIDA staff added 226,880 documents to its newest collection, the Teva and Allergan Documents. This batch brings the collection to more than 1.3 million documents and includes sales training presentations, marketing communications, and more.
The Teva and Allergan collection will encompass about 1.9 million documents when complete. Processed documents are being made public on a rolling basis with monthly releases expected through 2025.
Truth Tobacco Industry Documents
JUUL Labs Collection
2,800+ new documents were posted to the Juul Labs Collection today!
In partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, the IDL has processed and made available documents subject to public disclosure under Juul Labs’s 2021 settlement with North Carolina.
The IDL is pleased to announce that we have neared completion for the processing of these documents! The project began in December 2023, from which point our archivists have been working to release an average of 240,000 documents every month to our public website. With the onset of 2025, the IDL team has amassed a significantly smaller release of records this January, consisting of documents that required more time-consuming and complicated PII redactions, or some technical challenges that we saved for the end. However, this small release does indicate the majority of the North Carolina Juul Labs documents are now fully available online to our researcher communities.
In the coming months, the IDL archiving team will work through what is left in the NC Juul documents – all files that were originally large ZIP files, the structure of which has been disrupted, and the contents came to the IDL separated as individual records. We have observed that these small files, unfortunately, do not offer much value without the greater context of the original ZIP, and we will work towards reconciling that original structure and release the files accordingly.
New California JUUL Documents Coming Soon
Although we have neared the end of the North Carolina Juul documents, the IDL will soon release additional documents from the California Juul multistate settlement, which was negotiated by the California Department of Justice and six other states in 2023. These forthcoming releases will not be duplicates of the approximately 3 million Juul Labs records already in the IDL but rather are new additions that will further enrich the Juul Labs Collection. Our first release of the new California Juul documents will be coming next month.
Depositions and Trial Transcripts (DATTA)
57 new transcripts of tobacco trial testimony and depositions by Robert Proctor.
Chemical Industry Documents Archive: The Forever Pollution Project Collection
In February 2023, five European countries proposed a PFAS "universal restriction" under the EU chemical regulation REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals). The ban would include the entire PFAS chemical 'universe', with some derogations until alternatives are developed. In response, hundreds of industry players have been lobbying decision-makers across Europe to undermine and perhaps kill the proposal.
Over the course of a year, a team of 46 journalists in 16 countries investigated the lobbying and disinformation campaign by the PFAS industry and its allies.
This cross-border, interdisciplinary investigation known as the Forever Lobbying Project collected over 14,000 unpublished documents on PFAS, constituting the world’s largest collection to date on the topic. The majority originate from 184 freedom of information requests, 66 of which were shared with the group by the EU lobby watchdog, Corporate Europe Observatory.
This unique trove of documents was donated by the Forever Lobbying Project and is now available to the public in our new Forever Pollution Project Collection.
Purdue/Sackler settlement under consideration includes document disclosure requirement:
The proposed $7.4 billion settlement with members of the Sackler family and their company, Purdue Pharma (Purdue), includes a provision for document disclosure, which would require Purdue to make public more than 30 million documents related to Purdue and the Sacklers’ opioid business.
According to the Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General, if the settlement is approved, the documents are “expected to be added to the existing public document repository” (UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive) that already houses millions of documents from multiple industries responsible for the crisis.
UCSF and Johns Hopkins University are pleased that these vitally significant documents are one step closer to being made public. The Opioid Industry Documents Archive provides evidence on how and why this crisis happened, so that this type of tragedy can be prevented from occurring again.
We look forward to having the opportunity to contribute our expertise in public health, digital archives, and information technology to enable timely and free public access to these important documents.
Center to End Corporate Harm Launches at UCSF
We are very excited to announce the new UCSF Center to End Corporate Harm!
Products, including fossil fuels, chemicals, alcohol, tobacco and ultra-processed foods are now responsible for approximately one in three deaths worldwide. In the US, a rise in chronic diseases, including cancer (175%), diabetes (283%), Parkinson’s (133%), and dementias (75%), have led to what the scientists say is an “industrial epidemic” of disease.
The Center to End Corporate Harm brings together scientists, researchers, and physicians who study various health-harming industries and, in collaboration with the UCSF Industry Documents Library, are working to identify, analyze, and prevent industry-driven disease and develop strategies to counter the destructive influence of polluters and poisoners.
Could You Be the 2025 UCSF Library Artist in Residence?
The UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections and Makers Lab are accepting proposals for the sixth annual UCSF Library Artist in Residence program. The UCSF Library Artist in Residence award, valued at $8,000, will be given annually to one candidate with a degree in studio arts or a related field or a history of exhibiting artistic work in professional venues. The 2025 residency will begin on July 1, 2025 and end on June 30, 2026.
For more information and application process, please visit the UCSF Library site
UC Love Data Week
The UC Love Data Week is a week-long offering of presentations and workshops focused on data access, management, security, sharing, and preservation. All members of the University of California community are welcome to attend.
The IDL will be featured in the Friday, February 14th session at 3pm:
Unlocking image, audio, and video data in the Industry Documents Library: a Python based, open source stack for audio transcription, text extraction, sentiment analysis, and topic classification
Over the course of a year, a team of 46 journalists in 16 countries investigated an ongoing orchestrated lobbying and disinformation campaign by the PFAS industry and its allies, with the aim of watering down an EU proposal to ban “forever chemicals” and shifting the burden of environmental pollution onto society. The cross-border, interdisciplinary investigation reveals for the first time the staggering cost of cleaning PFAS contamination in Europe if emissions remain unrestricted: €2 trillion over a 20-year period, an annual bill of €100 billion.
PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a family of over 10,000 man-made chemicals. Manufactured by a handful of companies, they are widely used in consumer products and industrial processes and equipment, from toilet paper to cable insulation in aircraft. Their miracle properties, however, have fateful downsides. Almost indestructible without human intervention and persistent in living organisms, PFAS have been linked to cancers, immune and hormone disruption, infertility, and other illnesses.
In February 2023, five European countries proposed a PFAS "universal restriction" under the EU chemical regulation REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals). The ban would include the entire PFAS chemical 'universe', with some derogations until alternatives are developed. In response, hundreds of industry players have been lobbying decision-makers across Europe to undermine and perhaps kill the proposal.
The team collected over 14,000 unpublished documents on PFAS, constituting the world’s largest collection to date on the topic. The majority originate from 184 freedom of information requests, 66 of which were shared with the group by EU lobby watchdog, Corporate Europe Observatory.
This unique trove of documents is now available to the public in our new Forever Pollution Project Collection.
Read more about the new Forever Lobbying Project, as well as the just-released Corporate Europe Observatory publication 'Chemical Reaction,' an in-depth report exposing the corporate lobby threat to the EU PFAS ban.
As 2024 comes to a close, we’d like to share our gratitude for all of you in the IDL community and your ongoing support and connection to our work.
Here are some of the achievements you helped us reach in 2024:
22,459,816 documents now available through IDL!
If you’re able, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Industry Documents Library to help us preserve and provide access to the collections for years to come.
From all of us at the IDL, we wish you a peaceful holiday season, and a healthy and hopeful New Year ahead.
Kate, Rachel, Rebecca, Sven, Melissa, J.A., Emma, and Julie
