London

Project member Kelley Lee brandishes one of 40,000 forms submitted to access BAT's depository. Credit: A. KOERBER

Public-health researchers have unveiled a project to tackle what they describe as information concealment by the UK-based multinational firm British American Tobacco (BAT). The group aims to publish some 8 million pages of the company's documents on an independent website, making them more easily accessible.

The researchers accuse BAT of obstructing public attempts to access papers at its depository in Guildford, UK, and allege that some files detailing the company's activities have been removed or altered. The facility, they say, limits visitor numbers, doesn't provide an easily searchable index of its material, and does not allow onsite photocopying of documents. Visitors must request copies from BAT, which can take up to 12 months to arrive.

“This sort off conduct raises questions as to the true public availability of the depository's contents,” says Kelley Lee, a public-health expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a project member.

BAT denies that any files have been deleted. Regarding access to the depository, “it was never designed to work like a public library”, says Michael Prideaux, BAT's corporate and regulatory affairs director. He adds that researchers are welcome to reproduce material given to them by BAT.

The depository was opened in 1999 in response to a 1998 settlement between the state of Minnesota and the tobacco industry, which mandated that the documents be made available to the public. In accordance with the ruling, US-based defendants have their Minnesota repository administered by an independent legal firm, but BAT runs its Guildford depository itself.

In 2000, a British government committee recommended that BAT publish the depository's entire contents on the Internet to facilitate access. But so far the company has only stored 350,000 pages electronically, and has not posted those online.

The £2-million (US$3.6-million) initiative, called the Guildford Archiving Project, is backed by a slew of public-health organizations, including the Wellcome Trust and the American Heart Association. Together they have ordered copies of the depository's entire contents, which involved completing more than 40,000 order forms. They aim to post them, fully indexed, on a website run by the University of California, San Francisco.

The project's leaders claim that, since researchers began visiting the depository in 2000, more than 180 sets of documents, totalling some 36,000 pages, have disappeared from the company's list of files.

In this week's issue of The Lancet, a group of the project's researchers describes how documents originally referring to marketing to 16-year-olds were altered to read “18-year-olds” instead (M. E. Muggli, E. M. LeGresley and R. D. Hurt Lancet 363, 1812–1819; 2004).

They also claim that an audio recording about a marketing strategy was later deleted, removing phrases such as: “if you just say, this is a cheap cigarette for you dirt poor little black farmers … they're not going to go for it.” The deletion may have been accidental, they add, and a master copy was provided on request. But the incident highlights how some information may go missing, they say.

BAT spokeswoman Teresa La Thangue denies that any documents have been removed, and says that the apparently missing documents were probably duplicates.