(2017-01-23) Chan Zuckerberg Buying Meta

The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative is buying the Meta science Search Engine, and will make its tool free to all in a few months after enhancing the product... By taking Meta out of the commercial space and refocusing ans maximizing its value, CZI could solve one of science’s biggest problems for a much wider community. Simply put, there’s far too much research for any one scientist or even a whole team to keep up with. 2,000-4,000 papers are published each day about biomedicine alone, yet it’s hard to search across them or figure out which are the most reputable. Meta, formerly known as Sciencescape, indexes entire repositories of papers like PubMed and crawls the web, identifying and building profiles for the authors while analyzing who cites or links to what. It’s effectively Google PageRank for science, making it simple to discover relevant papers and prioritize which to read.

Joe Esposito on What the Acquisition of Meta Means for Scholarly Publishers

• Meta could analyze an article and predict how many citations it would garner in three years
• Meta did not set out to disrupt publishers, nor is it interested in competing with what publishers do. This is not Academia.edu or ResearchGate, nor, god help us, Sci-Hub. A critical decision made early in the company’s history was never to display the text of a scientific paper, which meant that Meta was not and is not seeking to substitute for publishers’ products.

Dan Whaley is thrilled

• A serious piece of scholarly infrastructure is being made open, free and effectively non-profit. Meta has built a cutting edge system to mine scholarly papers new and old, and allow the data to be employed in diverse ways–predicting discoveries before they’re made, projecting the future impact of papers just hours old, and unlocking the potential for innumerable applications applying computation at scale across scientific literature.
• only a few independent organizations dedicate themselves to creating and operating open, non-profit scientific or scholarly infrastructure. Beyond Crossref, ORCID, Wikimedia, JSTOR, PLOS, Project Jupyter, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, CoKo, Center for Open Science, OJS, DAT, rOpenSci, ContentMine and Hypothesis, few others come to mind.
• Sloan, Shuttleworth, Mellon, Omidyar, Knight, Arnold and Moore foundations