Meta (academic company)

Originally founded as Sciencescape by Sam Molyneux and Amy Molyneux in Toronto, Canada, Meta is a big data analysis company for scientific literature.

The platform leverages artificial intelligence for scientific literature discovery. Users can set up a custom feed with specific topics of interest or browse the pre-curated feed. Between 2010, the year Meta (Sciencescape) was founded, and 2016, the platform had analyzed over 26 million papers and profiled 14 million researchers. The company built its platform by searching for open publications, scanning and collecting information on authors and citations, and developing partnerships with publishers in science, math, and technology fields. Publishing partners are compensated through additional exposure for their written journals and studies. Some partnered publishers are the American Medical Association, BioMed Central, and Sage Publishing.

Meta provides real-time updates from PubMed and, additionally, provides access to 22 million papers dating back as far as the 1800s. The AI learns by sifting through papers, journals, and user behavior data to pinpoint key topics and research points. The AI also develops visualizations about research fields by organizing the papers by date of publication and citation counts to present the information to allow users to identify historical marks.

In 2017, Meta merged with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It was the first acquisition of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Meta now resides in a 102,079sqft office building in Redwood City, California, that was rented and renovated by Chan and Zuckerberg in 2017 to act as HQ for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.