Meta ULC

Founded	2009
Founders	Sam Molyneux, Amy Molyneux
Defunct	March 31, 2022 (2022-03-31)
Headquarters	Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Area served	Academia, government, publishing, industry
Services	Scientific knowledge network powered by machine intelligence
Number of employees	350
Website	meta.org

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]

History

Beginning

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

Meta merged with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2017, marking the Initiative's first acquisition.^[16]

Shutdown

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

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]

References

External links

• Official website