Meta ULC was a Canadian

unlimited liability corporation An unlimited liability corporation (ULC) within Canadian corporate law is a Canadian corporation designation, wherein shareholders are liable up to unlimited amounts for any liability, act or default of the corporation. By comparison, in most corp ...

performing

big data Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

analysis of

scientific literature : ''For a broader class of literature, see Academic publishing.'' Scientific literature comprises scholarly publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences. Within an academic field, scient ...

, which was acquired by the

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is an organization established and owned by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan with an investment of 99 percent of the couple's wealth from their Facebook shares over their lifetime ...

and shut down in 2021, effective in 2022.

History

Beginning

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 The Ontario Cancer Institute (OCI) is the research division of Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, affiliated to the University Health Network of the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine. As Canada's first dedicated cancer hospital, it opened of ...

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. The company was headquartered in Redwood City, California (formerly

Toronto Toronto ( ; or ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of Ontario. With a recorded population of 2,794,356 in 2021, it is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America. The city is the ancho ...

, Ontario, Canada) and operated Meta Science, a literature discovery platform. As of September 2016, Meta had analyzed over 26 million papers and profiled 14 million researchers. Using

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

, 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 The American Medical Association (AMA) is a professional association and lobbying group of physicians and medical students. Founded in 1847, it is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Membership was approximately 240,000 in 2016. The AMA's state ...

BioMed Central BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open a ...

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', th ...

Karger Karger Publishers (also: Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers, S. Karger AG) is an academic publisher of scientific and medical journals and books. The current CEO is Daniel Ebneter. History The company was founded in 1890 in Berlin by Sam ...

Sage Publishing SAGE Publishing, formerly SAGE Publications, is an American independent publishing company founded in 1965 in New York by Sara Miller McCune and now based in Newbury Park, California. It publishes more than 1,000 journals, more than 800 books ...

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group is an international company originating in England that publishes books and academic journals. Its parts include Taylor & Francis, Routledge, F1000 (publisher), F1000 Research or Dovepress. It is a division of Informa ...

Wolters Kluwer Wolters Kluwer N.V. () is a Dutch information services company. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, Netherlands (Global) and Philadelphia, United States (corporate). Wolters Kluwer in its current form was founded in 1987 with a ...

, and the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

. The technology for the platform was developed via a joint partnership between Meta and SRI International.

Merge with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Meta merged with the

in 2017, marking the Initiative's first acquisition.

Shutdown

On October 28, 2021, the

announced the sunset of Meta, with a proposed shutdown date of March 31, 2022.

Features and specifications

Meta includes coverage of the biomedical sciences with real-time updates from

PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain the ...

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 Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

genes In biology, the word gene (from , ; "...Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a ba ...

diseases A disease is a particular abnormal condition that negatively affects the structure or function of all or part of an organism, and that is not immediately due to any external injury. Diseases are often known to be medical conditions that ar ...

genetic disorders A genetic disorder is a health problem caused by one or more abnormalities in the genome. It can be caused by a mutation in a single gene (monogenic) or multiple genes (polygenic) or by a chromosomal abnormality. Although polygenic disorders ...

drugs A drug is any chemical substance that causes a change in an organism's physiology or psychology when consumed. Drugs are typically distinguished from food and substances that provide nutritional support. Consumption of drugs can be via inhalat ...

, people, labs & institutes, and journals.

References

External links

* {{Authority control Science education Research projects