For internet researchers, access to data has always been precarious (Freelon, 2018). Twitter’s recent decision to end support for their Academic API makes it the latest to drastically limit data access for many researchers, exemplifying the precarity of social media data. The unpredictability of data access, however, has a silver lining: researchers are seeking alternative, independent approaches to both collecting and sharing data.

In this context, we propose a roundtable session to discuss revolutionary efforts to build data archives that can be accessed by a variety of researchers. Thus far, collection efforts by researchers have been piecemeal, resulting in many researchers and teams collecting roughly similar data over and over again. This is exacerbated by obstacles to collaboration related to competition, privacy concerns, and legal restrictions, impacting both academic and non-academic researchers. But this does not need to be the case. Internet researchers, now more than ever, are seeing the benefits of collaborating on data collection and archiving efforts.

Our initial participants will consist of the following individuals: Megan Brown, Libby Hemphill, Cameron Hickey, J. Nathan Matias, and Kaiya Soorholtz; researchers who are working on collaborative data archives of varying levels of access and size. The roundtable will focus on existing data archives, challenges to collecting and making them accessible, and strategies for increasing access and cooperation. For instance, we will discuss legal challenges that platforms’ terms of services present for data sharing, ethical issues in both collecting and archiving data, and computational demands for preserving and provisioning social media data archives.

We anticipate the roundtable to be an exchange of ideas and suggestions, as well as a discussion of challenges to developing independent data archives. We look forward to sharing the latest in these archive developments and in hearing from AOIR researchers about their data needs and challenges.