Facebook Inc. is opening its doors to 60 researchers around the world so they can better understand how the platform affects democracy and elections.

“We hope this initiative will deepen public understanding of the role social media has on elections and democracy and help Facebook and other companies improve their products and practices,” Facebook said in a statement Monday.

The company said the move to opening up to independent research began last year, and Facebook plays no role in how the research is conducted or has any influence on the conclusions. The researchers chosen for various grants were also not chosen by Facebook.

Those academics will only be able to work with a timeframe from January 2017 to February 2019. They will have access to data which shows them what websites users had been posting on the platform, while also being able to see how advertisers use the website.

In terms of what news is shared on the platform and what influence that had, researchers will be given access to the CrowdTangle API. This will allow them see public Facebook and Instagram data. Others will have access to the Ad Library API, which will provide data on ads posted that were related to politics in the U.S., the U.K., Brazil, India, Ukraine, Israel and the EU.

On top of that, the researchers will also have access to the URL data set. That will reveal websites with posts by at least 100 unique users, a summary of content from the URL, where it was shared, how many times it was shared and how it fared with fact-checking ratings from Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners. The results will be anonymized to protect user privacy.

“The urgency of this research cannot be overstated,” said Social Science One, whose been collaborating with Facebook on the research. “Elections in India are already underway, the European Parliamentary elections will take place in short order, and the U.S. presidential primary campaigns have begun in earnest.”

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