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 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, scie ...

, 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 lifet ...

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 anch ...

, 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, 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 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'', ...

, Karger, Sage Publishing,

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 m ...

, 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 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, diseases, genetic disorders, drugs, people, labs & institutes, and journals.

References

External links

* {{Authority control Science education Research projects