Meta (academic company)


Meta is a company performing big data analysis of scientific literature. Company is headquartered in Redwood City, California and operates Meta Science, a literature discovery platform. The company was acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2017.

History

Meta Inc., formerly Sciencescape Inc., 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. The service was developed with the intention of curating the millions of articles in the area of academic publishing.
As of September 2016, Meta has analyzed over 26 million papers and profiled 14 million researchers. The company has struck deals with publishers in science, technology and mathematics fields, which give the company access to full-text versions of more than 18,000 journals. 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. These include the American Medical Association, BioMed Central, Elsevier, Karger, Sage Publishing, Taylor & Francis, Wolters Kluwer, and the Royal Society. The technology for the platform was developed via a joint partnership between Meta and SRI International.

Features and specifications

Meta includes coverage of the biomedical sciences with real-time updates from PubMed and other sources. The website provides access to over 22 million papers with publication dates as early as the 1800s. By sifting through papers and learning from user behavior, the service pinpoints key pieces of research and provides relevant search results. 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.
The Meta Science research platform uses algorithms that allow users to sort new publications according to subject matter. Users can subscribe to feeds for areas of research including biology, genes, diseases, genetic disorders, drugs, people, labs & institutes, and journals.

Merge with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Meta merged with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2017, marking the Initiative's first acquisition.