Today we’re introducing a pilot project we’re calling Twitter Data Grants, through which we’ll give a handful of research institutions access to our public and historical data. With more than 500 million Tweets a day, Twitter has an expansive set of data from which we can glean insights and learn about a variety of topics, from health-related information such as when and where the flu may hit to global events like ringing in the new year.

To date, it has been challenging for researchers outside the company who are tackling big questions to collaborate with us to access our public, historical data. Our Data Grants program aims to change that by connecting research institutions and academics with the data they need.

If you’d like to participate, submit a proposal here no later than March 15th. For this initial pilot, we’ll select a small number of proposals to receive free datasets. We can do this thanks to Gnip, one of our certified data reseller partners. They are working with us to give selected institutions free and easy access to Twitter datasets. In addition to the data, we will also be offering opportunities for the selected institutions to collaborate with Twitter engineers and researchers.

We encourage those of you at research institutions using Twitter data to send in your best proposals. To get updates and stay in touch with the program: visit research.twitter.com, make sure to follow @TwitterEng, or email data-grants@twitter.com with questions.