The Digital Ecologies Research Partnership, An Initiative by Websites Like Reddit to Provide Data to Researchers

The Digital Ecologies Research Partnership (DERP) is an initiative by websites like reddit to provide public social data to academic researchers. Other involved community websites include Imgur, FARK, StackExchange, and Twitch. DERP specifically aims to solve two major problems: the difficulty for academic researchers to obtain this kind of data, and the difficulty in providing cross-platform analysis. Interested researchers can submit a proposal with a research outline in order to access DERP community data.

DERP focuses on providing public data to academic researchers while facilitating an active online research community of Fellows. DERP will only support research that respects user privacy, responsibly uses data, and meets IRB approval. All research supported by DERP will be released openly and made publicly available. Partner platforms may also have additional guidelines and privacy commitments that apply to the research they support.

via Tim Hwang