Opening Meta
Yesterday, the scholarly communication + AI startup Meta signed an agreement to be acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Aside from the initial news a few weeks ago and Joe Esposito’s article in the Scholarly Kitchen, I’ve seen few people remark on it.
But it’s a big deal.
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. In what must have taken extraordinary patience, persistence and a lot of finesse, they managed to secure access to some of the most strategic closed content in the scholarly world.