Academic researchers will be granted unprecedented access to the data of major social networks including Imgur, Reddit, and Twitch as part of a joint initiative: The Digital Ecologies Research Partnership (Derp).

Derp – and yes, that really is its name – will be offering data to universities including Harvard, MIT and McGill, to promote “open, publicly accessible, and ethical academic inquiry into the vibrant social dynamics of the web”.

It came about “as a result of Imgur talking with a number of other community platforms online trying to learn about how they work with academic researchers,” says Tim Hwang, the image-sharing site’s head of special initiatives.

“In most cases, the data provided through Derp will already be accessible through public APIs,” he says. “Our belief is that there are ways of doing research better, and in a way that strongly respects user privacy and responsible use of data.

“Derp is an alliance of platforms that all believe strongly in this. In working with academic researchers, we support projects that meet institutional review at their home institution, and all research supported by Derp will be released openly and made publicly available.”

Hwang points to a Stanford paper analysing the success of Reddit’s Random Acts of Pizza subforum as an example of the sort of research Derp hopes to foster. In the research, Tim Althoff, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Dan Jurafsky found that the likelihood of getting a free pizza from the Reddit community depended on a number of factors, including how the request was phrased, how much the user posted on the site, and how many friends they had online. In the end, they were able to predict with 67% accuracy whether or not a given request would be fulfilled.

The grouping, which also includes Fark and Stack Exchange, aims to solve two problems academic research faces. Researchers themselves find it hard to get data outside of the larges social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook. The major services at least have a vibrant community of developers and researchers working on ways to access and use data, but for smaller communities, there’s little help provided.

Yet smaller is relative: Reddit may be a shrimp compared to Facebook, but with 115 million unique visitors every month, it’s still a sizeable community. And so Derp aims to offer “a single point of contact for researchers to get in touch with relevant team members across a range of different community sites.

“We envision that this will lower the friction to investigating these sites in more depth, and broaden the scope of research happening within the academic community,” the organisation says.

The other major problem the organisation is helping tackle is the difficulty of cross-platform analyses. “By bringing a number community sites together under a single cooperative effort, we intend to lower the friction to doing so, as well as better enable the sites themselves to coordinate with one another on supporting researchers.”

Molly Sauter, a student at Montreal’s McGill University who is one of the researchers working with Derp, says she is “super excited” about the program. “I feel like not only is it going to make it easier for researchers to gain access to important and interesting data sets, but it will also help diversify the online populations and communities being studied,” she todl the Guardian.

“We have a couple of fellows in the initial class who are interested in how civic and political processes play out in online communities, and I think there are some datasets out there which could yield some very interesting findings in that area. Most of my work in is online social movements and hacker culture, so there’s a lot of data here to be excited about.”