Pharma Watchdog Needs Your Help With Incriminating Documents

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By Brandon Keim March 4, 2010 | 12:54 pm | Categories: Medicine, Open Data


Overwhelmed by thousands of documents describing the inner workings of pharmaceutical companies, the Drug Industry Document Archive wants to enlist the help of crowds.

Documents uncovered during lawsuits against drug companies could be made searchable to the public, just like documents from tobacco company lawsuits. The problem is that there are more files than DIDA’s own workers can handle. Until they’re processed, they can’t be properly searched. Crowdsourcing the project could speed the database’s growth.

“In the long run, it’s not feasible to get grants to add the documents, and we want to do it sooner rather than later,” said Kim Klausner, the Archive’s manager.

DIDA is an offshoot of the University of California, San Francisco’s Legacy Tobacco Documents Archive, which was born from the 1998 legal settlement between tobacco companies and 46 states that sued them. As a condition of the settlement, all industry documents uncovered during the trial had to be made readily available to the public. It now contains 11 million documents numbering some 60 million pages.



Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/crowdsourcing-dida/