A $15 million gift from the American Legacy Foundation to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), will be used to create a permanent internet archive of around 10 million once-secret tobacco industry documents. Two new programs will also be created: the American Legacy Foundation National Tobacco Documents Library and the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.

UCSF professor of medicine, Stanton Glantz, a well-known scholar of the tobacco industry will direct the center. “Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death and disease” says Glantz, who says that the medical value of the documents is “tremendous.” He adds, “They are the equivalent of the human genome for tobacco. They give a full view of the inside structure of the tobacco industry.” Glantz currently heads research on the effects of passive smoking and the incidence of heart disease. He is also involved in public policy issues such as how the industry interferes with tobacco control strategy.

The American Legacy Foundation was founded in 1998 as part of the $250 billion Master Settlement Agreement between 46 US States and tobacco companies (Nature Med. 5, 10; 1999).

Part of the agreement was the creation of industry-maintained web sites for such documents, and there are six such sites. However, these sites have limited search functionalities and in 2010 the tobacco industry has the right to remove documents from the internet according to the terms of the Master Settlement Agreement.

The UCSF site is independent of tobacco industry influence and documents will be freely and openly available to the public. Glantz hopes it will “completely transform the entire issue.”