{"id":18484,"date":"2017-01-31T07:51:36","date_gmt":"2017-01-31T06:51:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jurnsearch.wordpress.com\/?p=18484"},"modified":"2017-01-31T07:51:36","modified_gmt":"2017-01-31T06:51:36","slug":"meta-com-purchased-to-be-made-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/2017\/01\/31\/meta-com-purchased-to-be-made-free\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta.com purchased, to be made free"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the news this week, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) have purchased an academic search engine Meta<\/a>, and are set to… “offer Meta’s tools free to all researchers” at some point in the future. Very nice of them. <\/p>\n

Currently meta.com’s search is shuttered to the public, but the site is inviting sign-ups. Meta.com is not a name that’s been on the tip of my tongue, or covered here. I don’t recall if public access to it was ever available, but possibly not. Apparently the pre-Zuckerberg Meta was one a clutch of startups<\/a> trying to apply AI to a limited set of the academic literature — often in the relatively tame-but-lucrative biomedical field. I had a glancing post<\/a> here on the apparently-similar Iris AI 2.0 back in November. At its search tool level Iris AI seems to propose much the same search capabilities as Meta — but via a demo of 30m+ records harvested from repositories by CORE. In contrast the pre-Zuckerberg Meta.com covered PubMed, according to a November 2015 press-release, combining that with metadata input from “dozens of publishers”. Another November 2015 press release rather ambitiously claimed that Meta.com enabled a user to… <\/p>\n

“navigate the entirety of scientific information (25 million papers with 4,000 new ones published daily)”. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Ambitiously” because there’s no way that the “entirety of scientific information” in journal article form = 25m papers.<\/p>\n

After the Zuckerberg-boosted relaunch the stated aim is to expand the functionality via third-party access…<\/p>\n

“we will enable developers to build on it or integrate it into third party platforms and services … will embrace the ideas and efforts of researchers in the diverse fields that Meta intersects with \u2013 including machine learning, network science, ontologies, science metrics, and data visualization”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hopefully that opening up will also include open public access to the most juicy commercial bits of Meta.com, like the ‘early awareness’ Horizon Scanning module. This claimed<\/em> to be able to descry a predictive map of future research agendas and trends…<\/p>\n

“will enable academics and industries to maintain early awareness of emergent scientific and technical advances at a speed, scale and comprehensiveness far beyond human capacity, and years in advance”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Assuming that works as intended (I haven’t encountered any gushing reviews) I’m still not sure I’d want to absolutely rely on a predictive tool that only saw a fraction of the picture. Since a mere “25 million papers” seems a little lightweight, re: a claim to index “the entirety of scientific information”. On the other hand, if it covers all of the output in one’s tight little niche, and has semantic links out into a spread of related and similarly delimited fields, then it could be quite useful for some people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the news this week, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) have purchased an academic search engine Meta, and are …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-search","category-spotted-in-the-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}