Enabling Access to Online Platform Data: Research Data Infrastructures in the DSA Era

The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) introduces, for the first time, a legal framework granting researchers access to data from very large online platforms and search engines. This represents a profound shift in how platform data can be obtained: access becomes a regulated right rather than a technical workaround. Yet the DSA’s promise of transparency depends on the ability of researchers to meet stringent legal and technical requirements for security, confidentiality, and data protection. Few researchers can do so individually.This commentary argues that the emerging DSA regime makes research infrastructure a precondition for meaningful and lawful data access. Secure Processing Environments (SPEs) and other institutional arrangements can mediate between three actors — researchers, platforms, and Digital Services Coordinators — ensuring trust, compliance, and accountability. In this role, infrastructures become not just technical means but governance interfaces that translate regulatory obligations into practical research conditions.The shift from ad hoc data collection to regulated access requires more than new rules; it demands a reorientation of the research community itself. Building and sustaining infrastructures is now integral to enabling independent, transparent, and reproducible platform research. The DSA, we suggest, inaugurates a new phase in the politics of data access — one in which infrastructures mediate the relationship between science, regulation, and the digital platforms that shape public life.