Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Acquires and Will Free Up Science Search Engine Meta (techcrunch.com)

tomhath quotes a report from TechCrunch: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's $45 billion philanthropy organization is making its first acquisition in order to make it easier for scientists to search, read and tie together more than 26 million science research papers. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is acquiring Meta, an AI-powered research search engine startup, and will make its tool free to all in a few months after enhancing the product. Meta's AI recognizes authors and citations between papers so it can surface the most important research instead of just what has the best SEO. It also provides free full-text access to 18,000 journals and literature sources. Meta co-founder and CEO Sam Molyneux writes that "Going forward, our intent is not to profit from Meta's data and capabilities; instead we aim to ensure they get to those who need them most, across sectors and as quickly as possible, for the benefit of the world."

Comments

Why don't they create textbooks

[backslashdot]

College students are always complaining about the price of textbooks. Why can't Chan Zuckerberg pay some of the best textbook authors to publish their textbooks for free? They should pay authors based on distribution and some other metrics such that the incentive and competition to create really great textbooks remains.

They've got $45 billion. If they were willing to spend $100 million they could easily offer online textbooks for the top 50 college courses for free (and book versions for the printing cost). I don't think any of the top 50 textbooks were produced over $2 million each.

Re:Why don't they create textbooks

[RobinH]

The printing cost isn't what makes textbooks expensive - they're expensive because the person who writes them is typically the one teaching the course, and he can *make* his students purchase them. There are always cheaper textbooks available that they could choose. When you price a book at $9, almost all of that goes to the publisher, but if you price it at $90, more than half goes to the author (source: I looked into publishing a book on a technical topic). Textbooks are an income generator for professors.

Re:Why don't they create textbooks

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Remember, Da Zuck's "Charitable Foundation" isn't a charitable foundation. The first reports about it, were, quite poignantly, fake news. What he has created, is in fact an financial investment entity that allows him to play around with his fortune, while avoiding taxes.

So there is really no incentive to just give money away. He's letting researchers use the technology to drive its development. In a few years Da Zuck hopes to be charging for this service, and make money off this investment.

Re:Why don't they create textbooks

[Gussington]

The whole text book thing seems really archaic these days. Text books should just be wiki-fied, with version control and a print format function. Give editing to only authorised experts, and update annually as required and you're done. Cost would be trivial since content would be donated just like Wikipedia is now. How is this still an issue.

Re:Why don't they create textbooks

[h33t l4x0r]

After the recent story about Zuck suing Hawaiians to force them to give up their ancestral land, it's really hard for me to see him as anything other than a complete dickhead.

Wrong target

[Doub]

They should buy Elsevier, make it a non-profit, and republish their entire present and future portfolio online with free access for everyone.

Re:Wrong target

[netjiro]

Elsevier (RELX) costs around $30B total, so perhaps not. Better would be to very publicly and repeatedly proclaim that the era of closed scientific publications is over, then over a decade or so push down the value until controlling stake can be had for peanuts (relative). After that they can put it all public unless someone else has taken the step in the mean time.

Great, but I wonder what the catch is?

[hughbar]

As an old Brit, I admire many of our Victorian philanthropists, some in this list for example: http://londonist.com/2011/10/t... who did a great deal of good.

However the modern version always seems to have some catch, supporting stock prices or products, acquiring (more) big data etc. I'm waiting for simple altruism to come back into fashion. I'll certainly be dead before that, though. All these folks could go down about about $50m and live pretty comfortably too.

Re:Great, but I wonder what the catch is?

[hughbar]

Agree. I'm from the 60's so I remember the hippies. OK, a lot of that was very naive but also positive, humane and generous. We need (badly) to bring that spirit back.

Benefit of the world?

[jenningsthecat]

Part of me wants to applaud this initiative, yet another part of me is very uneasy. From a link in TFS:

...we built partnerships with dozens of publishers in a copyright aligned model...

"Copyright aligned"? I sorta get it; on the other hand any scientific data that was funded in whole or in part by the government, (either directly, or indirectly via tax breaks / subsidies), should be copyright-free as far as I'm concerned. Realistically, that means the vast majority of such data.

...we also commercialized an AI technology that can read millions of papers to uncover emerging discoveries years ahead of time...

This sounds potentially useful - so long as the scientists who use it don't fall into the trap of relying solely on this pre-digested data instead of going to the source. It also strikes me as a kind of censorship bottleneck. Whether selectively and on purpose, (for political ends), or accidentally because of faults in the algos or in the paradigm used in their design, a LOT of potentially important info will be caught in this giant data sieve and left behind.

We worked progressively through the creation of capabilities toward a universal system for analyzing scientific knowledge.

Except for some very fundamental principles, "universal" and "scientific knowledge" should be held to be mutually exclusive. There is no absolute, nor even objective, definition of "universal" when it comes to science, because science is constantly re-defining what we regard as universal.

In short, this idea may seem good from afar, but it may also be far from good when it's put into practice. The framing of this project just drips with hubris.