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Friday, February 07, 2025

January 2025 Updates - Tobacco, Opioid and Chemical Industry Documents

Collection Updates


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.


Education & Research Updates

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

Thursday, December 19, 2024

Industry Documents Library - 2024 in Review

Season’s Greetings from the UCSF Industry Documents Library!

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!

  • In collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, we continued to acquire and make public millions of documents disclosed in opioid litigation through the UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA), including a major new collection of Teva and Allergan materials. There are now over 4 million opioid industry documents available!
  • We launched the Juul Labs Collection in partnership with the University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We’ve added close to 3 million documents to the collection this year and it will continue to expand with additional Juul Labs documents in 2025.
  • We welcomed Emma James and Julie Hillpot to the IDL Team: Emma is our project archivist for the Juul Labs Collection, and Julie is supporting our data annotation and quality control workflows for opioid industry documents.
  • We delivered multiple webinars, workshops, and presentations, including the annual Tobacco and Other Industry Documents Workshop in partnership with the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.
  • We continued to make significant progress on redesigning and rebuilding the IDL website to add new features and make it easier to search. Stay tuned for more news about this next year!
  • We continued our Student Data Science Summer Fellowship in collaboration with the UCSF Library Archives & Special Collections and the Data Science and Open Scholarship team.
  • We added 33 new publications which cite industry documents to our Bibliography, bringing the total number of citations to 1,209!

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

Monday, October 21, 2024

2024 Undergraduate Summer Fellow: Gordon Lichtstein

The UCSF Industry Documents Library is pleased to highlight the work of 2024 Summer Fellow Gordon Lichtstein. Gordon is an incoming MIT student with an interest in the intersection of computer science and linguistics in NLP and the application of NLP for the betterment of humanity such as in environmental sustainability or the digital humanities.

Over the course of the 8-week internship, Gordon crafted and completed four distinct projects that leverage natural language processing and data science within the context of our JUUL Labs Collection and the broader IDL. Project One investigates the optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy of low-quality and handwritten documents in the absence of ground truth data. Project Two explores the implementation of embedding search algorithms and visualizations aimed at enhancing the relevance of document recommendations for users. Project Three employs txt-ferret to conduct a thorough scan of a substantial corpus of industry documents to identify sensitive information, including credit card numbers. Finally, Project Four assesses the biases present in large language model (LLM) summarization through the lens of sentiment analysis.

Read Gordon's entire report and reflection via eScholarship.

The IDL staff is deeply appreciative of Gordon's thoughtful and comprehensive contributions, as well as his engagement in team meetings and Amazon Web Services workshops. His projects and use of NLP techniques with our document corpus have greatly enriched our understanding.

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Season's Greetings! 2023 in Review

As 2023 comes to a close, we’d like to say a big THANK YOU to all of our researchers for your continuing support and connection to the Industry Documents Library.

We’re grateful for your interest in industry documents and for your participation in the IDL community, whether that’s through documents research, workshops and trainings, project partnerships, or strategic planning and guidance.

Here are some of the achievements you helped us reach in 2023:

18,387,011 documents now available through IDL!

  • In collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, we continued to acquire and make available millions of documents created by Insys Therapeutics disclosed in opioid litigation as well as a new collection of DEA materials for the UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive. This brings the total number of OIDA documents to 3.1M.

  • The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive team was honored to be the 2023 recipient of the Archival Innovator Award given by the Society of American Archivists. The Archival Innovator Award recognizes an archivist, a group of archivists, a repository, or an organization that demonstrates the greatest overall current impact on the profession or their communities.

  • With the support of the UCSF Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment (PHRE), IDL added the new Talc Litigation Collection to the Chemical Industry Documents Archive. This initial set of 3,500 documents was obtained through investigations and lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson, which alleged that the company knew its talc products contained asbestos, a known toxin linked to ovarian cancer and mesothelioma.

  • At the closing of the MN Tobacco Depository in 2021, we identified a number of tobacco industry files and videos that were missing from our holdings. The Minnesota Historical Society conducted a search and a major digitization project on our behalf and we are so grateful for their efforts! This year we began adding these missing files to TTID and will continue to do so through 2024.

  • We welcomed J.A. Nelson to the IDL Team this year. J.A. is our Sr Front-end Web Developer helping to build an updated version of the IDL website. More details about this rebuild will be coming in 2024!

  • This summer, we hosted one Senior Data Science Fellow, Noel Salmeron, and two Junior Data Science Fellows, Adam Silva and Bryce Quintos, in collaboration with the UCSF Data Science and Open Scholarship team. As senior fellow, Noel utilized our audiovisual materials on IDL to evaluate the transcription accuracy of digital archives and the impact on documentation along with the creation of subject words and descriptions. Read more about this project on the Archives & Special Collections Brought to Light blog.

  • UCSF Magazine wrote a wonderful piece, Corporate Strategy, National Tragedy: UCSF’s industry archives expose the marketing tactics that fueled the opioid epidemic, featuring Professor Dorie Apollonio and her work with UCSF pharmacy students using the opioid industry documents.

  • We added 18 new publications which cite industry documents to our Bibliography, bringing the total number of citations to 1,174!
2023 was a busy year for workshops and webinars!
  • In May, we delivered our Annual Tobacco and Industry Documents Workshop.
  • Also in May, we had the pleasure of participating in the joint UCSF-JHU OIDA webinar "Exploring the Opioid Industry Documents: Research Communities, Educational Opportunities, and Community Data" (recording available)
  • In August, we assisted with a workshop on Breast Cancer and Industry Documents where advocates learned about a 1-year research project uncovering what industry knew about breast cancer risk and their products as well as new methodologies for research, advocacy and journalism collaborations.

From all of us at the IDL, we wish you a safe and festive holiday season, and a healthy and hopeful New Year ahead.

Kate, Rachel, Rebecca, Sven, Melissa and J.A.
Thursday, January 19, 2023

130,000 New Industry Documents Posted & New Fellowship Opportunities for 2023


OIDA Updates


Opioid Industry Documents Archive
We added 127,511 documents to the UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive's Insys Litigation Documents collection. These documents, which arise from Insys’s early years bringing the fentanyl spray Subsys to market (2012–2013), shed new light on the genesis of the company’s speaker program and reimbursement center (See the Insys At a Glance page for more information), both of which have featured prominently in litigation against Insys.

This release is the fourth batch of Insys documents to be added to OIDA; the Insys collection ultimately will contain several million documents that are currently being processed chronologically. Processed documents will be made public on a rolling basis with monthly releases expected in 2023–2024. Information arising from a December 2022 release (UCSF News, Johns Hopkins University News) served as the basis for reporting from USA Today.

Opioid Industry Documents Archive National Advisory Committee Update
We are pleased to welcome four new members to our National Advisory Committee, a group that supports the Archive through expert recommendations on the project’s development and sustainability pertaining to use, transparency, accessibility, impact, and other measures: Sandy Alexander (former Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General), Michelle Muffett-Lipinski (recovery advocate and Founding Principal, Northshore Recovery High School), Melina Sherman (communications scholar, Knology), and Anthony Ryan Hatch (Professor of the Science in Society Program, Wesleyan University). Many thanks to our outgoing NAC member Beth Macy (author of Raising Lazarus and Dopesick) for her remarkable service.


Food Industry Documents Updates

3,600+ New USRTK Food Industry Documents Added
The 3,634 new documents posted today were donated by USRTK and acquired in their ongoing investigations into the influence of large food and beverage companies on academic partnerships and government regulatory processes around sugary beverages and obesity, among other topics.

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2023 Postdoctoral Fellowship Opportunities for Industry Documents Research - Apply Now!
We are pleased to share two 2023 postdoctoral fellowship opportunities at UCSF that will work with our collections.


Postdoctoral Fellowship in Opioid Industry Documents Research and Community Data Engagement - The UCSF OIDA Postdoctoral Fellow will pursue original, publishable research using materials housed in OIDA and work closely with the archive research team to enhance the accessibility and usability of archival materials for a diverse array of communities, with a particular focus on racial and health equity. Fellows will work on a multidisciplinary team including faculty, other postdoctoral fellows and research assistants and will be mentored by and work closely with researchers and information specialists at UCSF. Fellows will be based at the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/) and participate fully in the fellowship program. Fellows will also be affiliated with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the UCSF School of Medicine (https://humsci.ucsf.edu/).

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Tobacco Control Research -
The CTCRE Postdoctoral Fellowship offers diverse educational and research opportunities, including a grant writing seminar, graduate research positions, advocacy training, and individualized documents training. Work spans policy and historical research, economics, and science. Fellows are recruited from a variety of fields including the basic sciences, social sciences, public health practitioners, clinical fields, political science, history, economics, law, and marketing. Fellowship stipends range from $55,500 - $66,600, depending on years of postdoctoral experience.

More about the fellowships and application submission

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UCSF Digital Health Humanities Pilot


The Digital Health Humanities Pilot (DHHP) will facilitate new insights into historical health data. Participants from all disciplines (including faculty, staff, and other learners) will learn how to evaluate and integrate digital methods and “archives as data” into their research through a range of offerings and trainings utilizing datasets from holdings within the UCSF Archives and Special Collections (including the AIDS History Project and Industry Documents Library, among others.)

Check out the workshops and sign up!

UC Love Data Week (February 13-17)

Want more information on working with data?
The UC-wide Love Data Week offers free sessions on topics such as data access, management, security, sharing, and preservation.

Friday, December 16, 2022

Our Year in Review... Goodbye 2022!

As 2022 comes to a close, we’d like to say a big THANK YOU to all of you for your continuing support and connection to the Industry Documents Library.

We’re grateful for your interest in industry documents and for your participation in the IDL community, whether that’s through documents research, workshops and trainings, project partnerships, or strategic planning and guidance.

This year we celebrated 20 years (!!!) of making industry documents available online and we appreciate all the ways you’ve worked with us to make the IDL stronger.

Here are some of the achievements you helped us reach in 2022:

17,508,831 documents now available through IDL!
We added 2.3 million new documents to the collections in 2022 -

  • 156 in Tobacco,
  • 20,924 in Food,
  • 2,293,591 in Opioids

  • In collaboration with Johns Hopkins University, we continued to acquire and make available millions of documents created by Insys Therapeutics, Mallinckrodt, McKinsey & Co, Walgreens and Purdue Pharma disclosed in Opioid Litigation for the Opioid Industry Documents Archive.

  • We welcomed two new additions to the IDL Team this year and are very grateful for their needed presence and contributions:
    Melissa Ignacio, IDL Program Coordinator
    Erik-Paul Gibson, IDL User Experience Designer

  • We delivered our Annual Tobacco and Industry Documents Workshop in May, and a follow up webinar to last year's Food Industry Documents Archive Training Institute to help global health advocates learn how to search and use industry documents in their work

  • We hosted three incredible summer interns: 2 SFUSD students as Junior Data Science Fellows and a graduate student as a Senior Fellow in a program cohosted by IDL and UCSF Library's Data Science Initiative.

  • In November, we participated in the first Everlaw Summit and were featured in a fireside chat titled “Seeking Truth & Healing in Our Nation’s Deadly Opioid Crisis.”

  • We added 27 new publications which cite industry documents to our Bibliography, bringing the total citations to 1,145!


  • 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 safe and festive holiday season, and a healthy and hopeful New Year ahead.

    Kate, Rachel, Rebecca, Sven, Melissa and Erik
    Thursday, July 07, 2022

    "Documents are a gift to researchers, justice-seekers and students..."

    Guest Post by Charlotte Bismuth
    Bismuth is a former prosecutor and the author of Bad Medicine: Catching New York’s Deadliest Pill Pusher, as well as a member of FedUp!’s Advocacy Committee. She serves on UCSF-Johns Hopkins University OIDA’s National Advisory Committee.


    As a junior associate at a big New York City law firm in the early 2000s, I spent my days—and nights—conducting document review. It was not considered to be a choice assignment, but quickly grew into an obsession. With the latest release of Mallinckrodt and McKinsey documents, journalists and the public have a unique opportunity to further explore the cause of accountability in the opioid epidemic.

    The “document review” process, circa 2004, began when the firm received boxes upon boxes upon boxes of company records. We hired contractors to scan them into PDF form, then worked with our tech specialists to devise scanning protocols (indicating how we wanted folders, stapled documents, paper-clipped documents or loose assortments to be represented, as well as the numbers to be stamped at the bottom). These “Bates” numbers, popping up on the bottom right corner of every page through which we subsequently rifled, populated our nightmares. I still think of all this work today: there is so much invisible and essential labor in the creation of an electronic collection of images that are not only relevant but presented in their authentic form.

    Once the documents had been uploaded into the software program we used for review, we designed protocols for hierarchical tagging systems, which meant every sheet of paper would be categorized, analyzed and ranked by its content, creator, date, topic, relevance or “hotness.” Senior partners could then review their black binders of critical documents with the knowledge that everything below had been filtered by everyone below. As we made our way through each set of documents, we worked with the tech team to roll out “productions” in paper and electronic form, with accompanying privilege logs and cover letters. The entire process was rife with potential dangers: one missed redaction, one unintended enclosure, and your reputation would be toast. I still tremble at the memory of a few all-caps email messages I received in the middle of the night, on my Blackberry, calling me to task for a Bates number error or unintentionally blank sheet.

    My obsession with document review thus originated from self-preservation and fear. It developed into a passion when I prepared my first deposition. The defendant was a former New York State corrections officer who’d been accused of raping a female inmate. Though I had my binder of “hot docs” at the ready, it was my understanding of the body of documents we had obtained—their substance, their deficiencies and their gaps—that allowed me to maintain a sense of direction and achieve our deposition goals.

    A few years later, as an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan, I was working with a junior ADA on an investigation. It was “impossible,” he complained, to get through all the cell phone records we’d obtained in the time we had. It took me a moment to understand that he, unlike me, was not in a state of grateful enchantment before this trove of information.

    Before long, I was applying my document review skills to a landmark opioid prosecution. My case—involving a corrupt physician who sold controlled substance prescriptions in exchange for cash—was one of many that followed in the wake of Purdue Pharma’s fraudulent marketing of OxyContin. Without my “BigLaw” document skills, I never would have been able to marshal the volume of documentary evidence we needed to build the homicide, insurance fraud and reckless endangerment angles of the case. And ironically, I’ve since applied those skills—developed at the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, which represents Side B of the Sackler family—to support activists fighting against the Sacklers.

    Documents are a gift to researchers, justice-seekers and students. Everything and everyone leaves a trace. The truth may not always be what you expect, but skillful, careful and honest document review will allow you to make your peace with it.

    The possibilities for research and reporting using OIDA documents are rich, as we’ve already seen with Washington Post, Salon, and New York Times articles. I hope someone will choose to go through these documents with an eye to the contributions of the sales representatives and their supervisors, as well as the middle-level executives and the marketing teams. We—justly—have focused on members of the Sackler family and other high-profile industry leaders in seeking accountability for the opioid epidemic, but where are their foot soldiers now? In which industries are they peddling their skills at selling lies? I’ve taken just a few names and followed them into high-level pharmaceutical positions: who will conduct a more thorough examination? Have any of these individuals been held to task for their choices? Admitted their mistakes? Contributed any part of their ill-gotten gains to victims or any of their time to hard-hit communities?

    Documents allow us to verify facts and rebuild a disappeared world: in the case of the opioid epidemic, the OIDA documents may well help us repair the damage and prevent this tragedy from ever happening again.

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