Meta is a non-commercial tool that helps scientists understand global research developments and trends. Meta uses artificial intelligence (AI) to read the world’s scholarly papers, understand what is in them, and deliver their insights to researchers in real time. Early this year Meta was acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to help accelerate the pace of scientific discovery (see https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/23/chan-zuckerberg-initiative-meta/ )
Every day, more than 4,000 scholarly papers with new research and discoveries are published in biomedicine alone, but most will not be read by scientists who can learn from them. Why? Because the tools that exist for scientists today aren’t designed to point them to the most relevant new information as it is published – information that could be critical to advancing their research. For example, many search tools provide results based on the specific keywords provided by scientists. However, those tools don’t flag and prioritize new papers as they are published, and they don’t always show potentially important findings from related fields. This makes it easy for important discoveries to go unnoticed, and can even slow down the pace of scientific progress.
Meta has developed an AI-driven discovery engine to accelerate the pace of scientific progress – helping researchers avoid conducting experiments that have already been done, learn about key papers that may otherwise go unnoticed, and encourage investment in emerging fields of research earlier. Underpinning the Meta discovery engine (which is available free to anyone in the world) is a knowledge graph that includes 30 million+ scholarly articles. Meta has indexing agreements with dozens of publishers to make their content discoverable, including BMJ and the American Medical Association.
We are working with Meta for several reasons. The first is that Meta is a non-commercial entity with the sole aim of improving efficiencies in research discovery. Second, the Meta discovery engine delivers readers back to publishers’ pages on Ingenta. Although Meta requires access to your full-text to deeply mine connections between hundreds of classes of entities, it does not deliver the full text in any capacity. Nor does it pass users off to file-sharing services or allow them to post PDFs to the site. All traffic flows to you, the original publisher.
We think Meta is an extremely interesting and innovative development, and in June we signed an agreement to allow them to integrate with our discovery systems. This costs nothing, and there is no need for any action on the part of our publishers, but we believe integrating Meta will enable greater reach on the part of all our publishers, especially those working in the fields of science and medicine.
For more information about Meta, please contact:
Greg Tananbaum
Meta Strategic Partnerships
(510) 295-7504