Finally, access: How article 40 DSA changes platform research in practice

Summary

This article examines how Article 40 of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) reshapes the practical conditions of platform research by establishing new formal mechanisms for researcher access to data from very large online platforms. Ohme and Seiling assess what the regulation changes in day-to-day empirical work, tracing both the opportunities it opens — moving researchers from a regime of voluntary, precarious, or contested access toward a rights-based framework — and the procedural, methodological, and infrastructural challenges that remain. The piece is a conceptual, policy-oriented intervention in Political Communication that bridges regulatory developments and the methods of platform studies.

Key Contributions

• Offers an early practitioner-facing assessment of how DSA Article 40 reconfigures researcher access to platform data.
• Connects an evolving EU regulatory framework to concrete methodological practice in political communication and platform studies.
• Identifies opportunities and constraints introduced by the new access regime relative to the prior landscape of API closures and ad hoc data deals.

Methods

Conceptual and policy-oriented analysis of Article 40 of the DSA, read through its implications for empirical platform research practice rather than through original empirical data collection.

Findings

• Article 40 represents a substantive shift in the conditions under which platform research can legally and practically be conducted in the EU.
• The new access regime simultaneously alters opportunities (formal vetted-researcher pathways) and constraints (procedural, scoping, and infrastructural demands) compared to prior voluntary or restricted arrangements.
• Detailed empirical specifics of access workflows are beyond the scope of the abstract-level discussion.

Connections

This paper sits at the center of an emerging literature on the post-API, regulation-mediated era of platform research, closely paralleling work that interrogates the practical and political contours of DSA-enabled access such as Rieder2025-ju, Rieder2026-pp, and Bouchaud2026-lr. It complements broader critiques of the data-access crisis and its consequences for accountability research, including Freelon2024-sc, Murtfeldt2025-wu, and Bak-Coleman2025-pm, and connects to platform-specific governance and infrastructure analyses like Helmond2026-ll and Ventura2026-yc.