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IDL released the first tranche from its newest collection, the Endo Documents. This first batch includes over 100,000 documents; the collection will be OIDA's largest yet, encompassing close to 3.8 million documents when complete.
Endo, a pharmaceutical company based near Philadelphia, sold billions of opioid pills over two decades, including oxycodone/acetaminophen (Percocet) and oxymorphone hydrochloride extended-release (Opana ER). In 2013, it acquired Par Pharmaceuticals, a manufacturer of generic opioids.
Endo faced thousands of lawsuits from state and local governments, Native American tribes, and individuals who accused the company of fueling the opioid crisis by misrepresenting the safety of its drugs. In February 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a global settlement resolving both criminal and civil investigations into Endo, allowing the company to proceed with bankruptcy. As part of the resolution, Endo admitted that from April 2012 to May 2013, some of its sales representatives falsely promoted Opana ER as abuse-deterrent, despite a lack of clinical evidence. The settlement also addressed allegations that between 2011 and 2017, Endo marketed Opana for unapproved uses and failed to act on clear signs of doctor overprescribing and drug diversion.
This month, IDL staff added over 177,000 documents produced by the Settling States in the multistate litigation against Juul Labs. With this batch, the Juul Labs Collection has reached the 4 million document mark! 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.
We are excited to announce that the UCSF Industry Documents Library will be launching a new version of our website next month with a fresh look and feel! This new website will offer a more user-friendly experience with advanced search capabilities, improved content organization, and enhanced readability and accessibility.
New and Improved Website Features:
The IDL team received the Silver Award in Design at the 2025 UC Tech Awards! The University of California recognized outstanding contributions across the system, and we’re proud to be honored for our work redesigning and rebuilding the UCSF Industry Documents Library website. Stay tuned in August for the launch of our redesigned site!
Ruth Tabancay is the UCSF Library's 2024 Artist in Residence. At a well attended opening reception last month, Ruth introduced her exhibit, “Fossil Fuels: How Humans Commodified a Natural Resource” on the main floor of the Kalmanovitz Library and showcased her artwork.
As the UCSF Library Artist in Residence, Ruth continued her research into the adverse effects of global warming and plastic accumulation on the planet. She used the Fossil Fuel and the Chemical Collections in the Industry Documents Library to find early communications within those industries, responses to government regulations, and how these industries presented themselves to their stockholders and the public. Ruth also investigated the Archives and Special Collections' health sciences artifacts to reveal new ways in which she thinks about tools and their connections to public health and her art.
The artwork for the final exhibition incorporated plastic discarded at UCSF from various departments and locations to highlight the contributions that medical centers make to the growing mass of plastic waste.
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
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
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.
The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive (OIDA) added more than 34,000 documents to the Insys Litigation Documents collection. This documents drop contains emails and spreadsheets from 2014 discussing the many aspects of Insys's business activities, ranging from sales tracking spreadsheets to speakers bureau training.
The Insys collection ultimately will contain several million documents that are currently being processed chronologically. Processed documents are being made public on a rolling basis with monthly releases expected in 2023–2024.
100 documents were added to the USRTK Food Industry collection today. These documents were acquired by US Right to Know (USRTK) during 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.
77 new depositions and trial testimony documents were added to the DATTA collection today. These transcripts were donated by Dr. Robert Proctor and come from his efforts as expert witness in tobacco and smokeless tobacco litigation.
The recording of the May 5th webinar is now available on the event page!
Many thanks to Cecilia Tomori and Jason Chernesky for MC'ing this amazing event and to our wonderful presenters, Keith Wailoo, Kate Tasker, Adam Koon, and Gaurab Bhardwaj.
Opioid Industry Documents Archive
The UCSF-JHU Opioid Industry Documents Archive added more than 100,000 documents to the Insys Litigation Documents collection. The documents are from 2013 and 2014 and document many aspects of Insys's business activities, ranging from sales tracking spreadsheets to speakers bureau training to Reimbursement Center emails.
This release brings the total number of public Insys documents to more than 1.5 million; the Insys collection ultimately will contain several million documents that are currently being processed chronologically. Processed documents are being made public on a rolling basis with monthly releases expected in 2023–2024.
Food Industry Documents Archive Update
735 documents were added to the USRTK collection today, bringing the total number of documents to over 41,000! These documents were acquired by US Right to Know (USRTK) during 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.
Registration open for the Annual Tobacco and Industry Documents Workshop
Friday, May 12, 2023
9:30am - 2:15pm (PT)
This workshop will be a virtual event.
The UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education (CTCRE) will once again hold it's annual one-day workshop on using tobacco and other industry documents for advocacy. This popular workshop highlights how lessons learned from tobacco industry documents also apply to chemical, food, drug and opiate industries.
This year, the annual Tobacco and Industry Documents Workshop is collaborating with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies and Breast Cancer Action to uplift the use of the Industry Documents Library for breast cancer advocacy, campaign development, and research collaborations.
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Join us on May 5, 2023 for Exploring the Opioid Industry Documents: Research Communities, Educational Opportunities, and Community Data. This event will feature a webinar where scholars will discuss how they successfully use OIDA and other Industry Documents Library (IDL) collections.
Webinar: May 5: 8am PT / 11 am ET.