Transparency as a remedy against racketeering: preventing and restraining fraud by exposing Big Tobacco's dirty secrets

Monique Muggli, Howard Crystal, and Kim Klauser just published an excellent paper in Tobacco Control outlining the recent history of keeping the tobacco industry documents flowing into public view, including listing some of the improvements to the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library that will be released for public use in September, including:
 

• Enhanced search and retrieval software tools on LTDL.
• Log-in option allowing repeat users to save citations, search history and edit preferences (eg, how many results to display, sorting options, preferred citation format).
• Faceted searches giving users the option to filter results by date, document type and other parameters.
• Better suppression of duplicates and confidential documents.
• Timelines showing document dates in graphical form.
• More accurate relevancy ranking, easier query construction, including a ”find similar documents“ option, wildcard use in phrase searches and system offered search queries for misspellings (eg, ”did you mean?“).

 
The paper also details successful efforts to block the industry from removing documents from public view and to lift claims of secrecy from some documents.
 
Here is the abstract:
 

The 1990s state litigation that resulted in the tobacco industry's initial document disclosure obligations fully expired in 2010. These obligations have been extended and enhanced until 2021 through a federal lawsuit against the tobacco industry over violations of the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). In this special communication, we summarise and explain the new legal framework and enhanced document disclosure obligations of the major US tobacco companies. We describe the events leading up to these new requirements, including the tobacco companies’ failed attempt to close the Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository, the release of 100 000 documents onto the companies’ document websites discovered to have been publicly available at the Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository but not online, and the addition of over 2300 documents to those websites, which are also now publicly available at Minnesota after being secured for years in a separate, non-public storage room at the Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository. We also detail the document indexing enhancements and redesign of the University of California, San Francisco's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library website, made possible by the RICO litigation, and which is anticipated to be released in September 2014. Last, we highlight the public health community's continued opportunity to expose the US tobacco industry's efforts to undermine public health through these new search enhancements and improved document accessibility and due to the continuously growing document collection until at least 2021.

 
The full paper is available to all for free here.
 
I feel honored to work with these people who are empowering so many others to expose Big Tobacco's secrets.