Ohme, J., & Seiling, L. (2026). Finally, access: How article 40 DSA changes platform research in practice. Political Communication, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2026.2664157
Summary
This paper examines how Article 40 of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) reconfigures the practical conditions under which platform research is conducted. The authors argue that the DSA’s new mechanisms for researcher access to data from very large online platforms mark a substantive departure from the prior environment of largely voluntary, restricted, or precarious access. Framed as a contribution to Political Communication, the piece assesses what changes in day-to-day research practice and weighs the opportunities against the constraints that remain for scholars studying platform behaviour under the emerging EU regulatory regime.
Key Contributions
- Offers researchers in political communication and adjacent fields an assessment of how DSA Article 40 reshapes access to platform data.
- Bridges regulatory developments with the methodological realities of platform studies, connecting policy to empirical practice.
- Clarifies both the new opportunities and the persistent challenges researchers face under the DSA access regime.
Methods
Conceptual and policy-oriented analysis of Article 40 DSA, interpreting the regulation’s provisions in light of their consequences for empirical platform research practice rather than presenting new empirical data.
Findings
- Article 40 represents a substantive change in the conditions governing platform research within the EU.
- The new access regime alters both opportunities and constraints relative to the prior landscape of voluntary or restricted data access.
- (Detailed empirical findings are not specified in the available abstract; the contribution is primarily conceptual and forward-looking.)
Connections
This paper sits at the center of the platform-governance-data-access debate and connects to other work interrogating the DSA’s Article 40 access framework and its practical operation, such as Rieder2025-ju, Rieder2026-pp, Bruns2026-yv, and Votta2025-xz. It also relates to broader efforts to establish and evaluate researcher data-access infrastructures for very large online platforms, including Murtfeldt2025-wu, Bechmann2026-dr, and de-Vreese2026-zx.