Operationalizing Research Access in Platform Governance What to Learn from Other Industries?

This Report identifies best practices for research access regimes in the platform governance context, by learning from existing legal frameworks in other domains. Meaningful research access is a precondition for informed and effective platform governance. Platforms play a central and ever-expanding role in modern society. Due to their influence, scale, and complexity, a wide range of expert research is necessary to understand their impact on society, and hold them accountable where necessary. Yet, the data access needed to perform this research is sorely lacking. Ensuring adequate research access should therefore be a paramount priority in upcoming transparency reforms.
This Report contributes to the existing debates on data access by taking a step back from platform governance per se, and learning from other (regulatory) transparency frameworks in existence already. Specifically, the Report examines how key challenges have been tackled in other sectors, and formulates a number of best practices for a clear and effective research access framework in platform governance.
The best practices for research access in this Report are drawn from two case studies of data access frameworks in two different sectors: environmental protection, and medical research. In environmental law, we consider the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Regime. This case study is instructive for platforms for what we term the incentive problem: the regulated party has strong incentives to oppose, avoid and obstruct transparency demands. In medical research, we consider the Findata program, a recent Finnish legal initiative for enabling research access to health data in a data protection-compliant manner. This case study is instructive for what we term data protection concerns: the reticence of regulated companies to share information that might be traced back to identifiable data subjects.
The case studies reveal best practices for data access regulation.