OIDA Image Collection FAQ
1. What is the Opioid Industry Documents Archive?
OIDA was launched by the University of California, San Francisco and Johns Hopkins University in March 2021 as a free and highly accessible public resource. The digital repository contains a searchable collection of publicly disclosed documents arising from litigation brought against opioid manufacturers, distributors, pharmacies, and consultants by local and state governments and tribal communities.
2. What is the OIDA Image Collection?
The OIDA Image Collection highlights images extracted from documents created by the opioid industry. Many of these documents were designed for internal company audiences and board members, while others were targeted to prescribers and consumers. The images provide insight into corporate practices that shaped the opioid crisis.
3. How many images are in the OIDA Image Collection?
There are currently 3,907 images, and the number of images will continue to grow as new documents are added to OIDA.
4. Where did the images come from?
The images were extracted from documents found in OIDA. We have so far extracted images only from PowerPoint and Excel documents, not the many documents in OIDA in other file formats. Image descriptions include links to source documents. Image Collection visitors can explore the OIDA documents to see how images were utilized in context.
5. How were the images located?
We extracted images embedded in documents found in OIDA and then filtered them based on properties such as size and color variation. During this process, we discarded duplicates as well as less significant images, including stock photos, headshots, logos, signature blocks, and images that were indiscernible.
6. How were image descriptions and metadata generated?
OIDA staff at UCSF and Johns Hopkins generated some of the image descriptions, types, and other metadata using artificial intelligence (AI) models, with human experts revising some of these values. Some metadata, such as image categories (e.g., Addiction, Public Relations, Regulatory) and titles were created by human experts. Other manually created metadata about images may be added in the future.
7. Can I use these images in my teaching, research and/or reporting?
Yes, though you are responsible for determining whether you need permission from any copyright holders. The fair use doctrine (as codified in Section 107 of U.S. copyright law) recognizes that there are uses that do not infringe on the rights of copyright holders, meaning that certain uses can be made without permission from the copyright owner.
8. How should I cite these images?
Images should be cited using information about the source document from which the image arose, including the document’s author, title, date, collection, and the document’s unique URL (e.g., https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/opioids/docs/#id=hfyn0243). All of this information can be found on the document page and can be auto-populated using the “Cite Document” widget; see also our How to Cite Our Documents page.
9. Are there more images in OIDA than what is seen in the OIDA Image Collection?
Yes, the OIDA Image Collection contains only a portion of the total images in OIDA. There are formats we have not extracted images from (like PDF documents), and there are images we have chosen not to include for editorial reasons (like logos and headshots). Furthermore, OIDA is always adding new collections of documents, the most recent of which may not yet have been processed for adding images to the OIDA Image Collection.
10. Can I suggest images to be added to the OIDA Image Collection?
If you find an image in an OIDA document that you can’t find in the OIDA Image Collection, please let us know at [email protected]. The Image Collection draws exclusively from OIDA; we are not adding images that are not in OIDA documents.