That’s what the the Library and Center for Knowledge Management at the University of California at San Francisco Library wants to create. In fact, they’ve already got a small version. Called the Drug Industry Document Archive, it houses reams of studies, government reports, company documents and news articles concerning Neurontin, which Warner-Lambert - later bought by Pfizer - was charged with marketing off-label.

Based on their success in creating the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, which has helped legislators, policy makers and consumer advocates probe the tobacco industry, the center now wants to expand the DIDA into a full-blown resource that has endless searchable documents about pharma. Already, an unnamed New York law firm is willing to donate 20 million pages of Merck documents about Vioxx.

“We want to add documents from other pharma companies so that journalists, attorneys, consumer groups, academic researchers, policy makers and others can understand more fully the pharmaceutical industry’s scientific research, manufacturing, marketing, sales and governmental relations practices,” writes Kim Klausner, the Tobacco Digital Library Manager, who hopes to secure funding to make it happen.

“Who would benefit? Well, ultimately, the public will benefit, I’d hope. I can best describe how our tobacco digital libraries have worked: academic researchers, journalists, and tobacco control advocates have pored over the 7 million fully searchable, indexed tobacco industry documents. They’ve published over 480 peer-reviewed journal articles, created web sites, written news stories and issued reports…

“…They’ve used these mechanisms to lobby legislators, executive branch policy makers and corporations to provide smoke-free environments as well as the general public about the hazards of smoking and how the tobacco industry has tried, and continues to try, to manipulate scientific research and public policy.

The ultimate purpose of DIDA is to provide a resource that would enable those concerned with public health to learn more about how the pharmaceutical industry operates in ways that impede public health with the goal of changing that behavior.”