*Dear all,* Our Laboratory for Internet Studies (LINIS) is launching a collaborative service aimed at media & communication scholars from social science and humanities who may have great research ideas but cannot download or process the data they need. As a group of academics, we do not aim at becoming a for-profit data factory. Instead, we seek to offer the academic community such a division of labor that would help scholars get their research supported by data and ultimately published, and would simultaneously give us a chance to share and fully exploit our data-processing resources and skills that otherwise stay underused. *What are the challenges of big data collection & processing that we can help with?* · reformulate your research interest as a research task that can make use of the existing data “out there”; · reformulate this task in terms understandable by software developers; · connect to a developer who understands what a genuine academic research is; · download the data and store them in a database with a right structure; · make sure it has been done legally and ethically; · formulate what further manipulations with the data the developer should do to answer the final research question; · check the quality of the developer’s work; · provide related method advice. This may be a challenge even for those social scientists who do have experience with coding for small-scale data. LINIS has the experience in organizing full-cycle big data research including the listed procedures. *Right now we will support two major formats of resources & skills sharing:* · Data download and processing only: LINIS provides data for your research design without participating in publications and with LINIS expenses fully covered; · Collaborative work on both research design and data collection: LINIS shares expenses and participates in joint publications. More formats that would help bring together researchers with complementary skills may be supported in future if the pilot stage goes well. We will support only legal and ethical data collection and processing for academic research. We invite research groups, but above all individual researchers with modest research budgets to contact us via linis-spb@hse.ru <linis@hse.ru> . Olessia Koltsova Director, Laboratory for Internet Studies National Research University Higher School of Economics room 216, 55/2 Sedova St., 190008, St.Petersburg, Russia Phone: +7 (812) 560-00-55 www.linis.hse.ru E-mail: ekoltsova@hse.ru http://www.hse.ru/en/org/persons/202747