Twitter is sharing its massive trove of data with the academic world – for free.

The social networking outfit has long sold access to its enormous collection of tweets – a record of what the people of the world are doing and saying – hooking companies like Google and Yahoo into the "Twitter fire hose." But now, through a new grant program, it wants to make it easier for social scientists and other academics to explore its tweet archive, which stretches back to 2006.

Twitter previously worked with researchers from Johns Hopkins University to predict where flu outbreaks will hit, and the new program aims to open doors for similar projects. The company is now accepting applications from researchers, who have until March 15 to submit a proposal.

Academics see huge value in the data collected by social media companies like Twitter and Facebook. "You’ve got potentially the largest data set on human interaction ever," Devin Gaffney – a developer at a tech startup called Little Bird who holds a master’s degree in Social Science of the Internet from Oxford University – told us last year. "It will be biased towards people who are on the internet, but it’s still better than before. Plus, it’s less work. You don’t have to talk to 10,000 people. You just write some code to do it for you."

But researchers often struggle to gain access to the troves of data jealously guarded by social media companies. Facebook has shared its data with a few well known researchers, but it's hard for most people to get a look at. And Twitter only makes a small portion of its data available through its API, or application programming interface. If you want access to what Twitter calls the fire hose, you'll have to pay a premium to be one of its partner companies. Access to the fire hose generally starts at about $500 a month. Twitter's Data Grants program gives researchers a different route to the data, providing access through a reseller called Gnip.

It's unclear whether researchers can share these data sets with other academics in order to do peer review, and the company did not respond to a request for comment. But if the program follows the same terms and services as the Twitter API, then researchers won't be able to re-publish their data.

The lack of peer review can make it hard to evaluate the data studies published by social media companies themselves. For example, Facebook has published some of its own research on migration patterns and the evolution of memes within the social network, but it hasn't allowed outsiders to verify its results.

But such verification is key part of doing science. Pete Warden, a former Apple developer now at Jetpac, experienced this problem first hand in 2010 when he published an analysis of location data he scraped from Twitter. He originally shared both his data set and his results, but eventually took the data set down due to legal pressure from Facebook, making it impossible to conduct any sort of peer review on his work.

Regardless, Twitter's program is well welcome news. Some access to this enormous dataset is far better than none.