Meta (academic company)
Meta ULC was a Canadian unlimited liability corporation performing big data analysis of scientific literature, which was acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and shut down in 2021, effective in 2022.[1]
Not to be confused with Meta Platforms or Meta (augmented reality company).Founded
2009
Sam Molyneux, Amy Molyneux
March 31, 2022
Scientific knowledge network powered by machine intelligence
350
History[edit]
Beginning[edit]
Meta Inc., formerly Sciencescape Inc.,[2] was founded in 2010 by Sam and Amy Molyneux. Before co-founding Meta, Sam Molyneux studied cancer genomics at the Ontario Cancer Institute at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto.[3][4] The service was developed with the intention of curating the millions of articles in the area of academic publishing.[5][6][7][4][8][9]
The company was headquartered in Redwood City, California[10] (formerly Toronto, Ontario, Canada[5]) and operated Meta Science, a literature discovery platform.[6][7][3]
As of September 2016, Meta had analyzed over 26 million papers and profiled 14 million researchers.[11] Using natural language processing, Meta scans articles - as well as the millions of articles stored in open-access repositories - collecting information about authors, citations and topics. Participating publishers receive exposure for their journals in return.[12] These include the American Medical Association, BioMed Central, Elsevier, Karger, SAGE Publishing, Taylor & Francis, Wolters Kluwer, and the Royal Society.[13][14] The technology for the platform was developed via a joint partnership between Meta and SRI International.[15]
Merge with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative[edit]
Meta merged with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2017, marking the Initiative's first acquisition.[16]
Shutdown[edit]
On October 28, 2021, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced the sunset of Meta, with a proposed shutdown date of March 31, 2022.[1]
Features and specifications[edit]
Meta includes coverage of the biomedical sciences with real-time updates from PubMed and other sources.[17] The website provides access to over 22 million papers with publication dates as early as the 1800s.[8][9] By sifting through papers and learning from user behavior, the service pinpoints key pieces of research and provides relevant search results.[6] Meta also provides visualizations about a field of research by organizing papers by their date of publication and citation count and then presenting the information in a way that allows users to quickly identify key historical papers.[3]
The Meta Science research platform uses algorithms that allow users to sort new publications according to subject matter.[5] Users can subscribe to feeds for areas of research including biology, genes, diseases, genetic disorders, drugs, people, labs & institutes, and journals.[5][4][18]