Chan Zuckerberg - Meta and preprints

The Chan Zuckerberg initiative will be funding science in various areas, with a particular focus on diseases.

To accelerate this progress, we will bring scientists and engineers together in new ways, create computational and experimental tools to empower the scientific community and build a movement to support basic science research.

from https://chanzuckerberg.com/initiatives/

Chan Zuckerberg has launched with an initial US$3 billion commitment to basic research, as reported in Inside Philanthropy.

There is a particular emphasis on funding high-risk ideas:

Forty-seven investigators will receive up to US$1.5 million each in the next five years from the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a partnership between the couple’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and three universities: Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco. Together, the biohub grants announced on 8 February total more than $50 million.

“We told researchers, give us your riskiest ideas,” says biohub co-leader Stephen Quake, a bioengineer at Stanford.

from Nature - 'Riskiest ideas' win $50 million from Chan Zuckerberg Biohub - February 8, 2017

Several projects and technologies have been announced, including:

Chan Zuckerberg Biohub - this appears to be the central focus for the science activities

Meta - a science search engine that Chan Zuckerberg purchased and has promised to make available to the public for free.  It is planned it will become a sort of AI analysis tool for the science literature.

There is no open science policy statement available that I can find on any of the Chan Zuckerberg sites.  There is apparently a requirement to post preprints at time of submission.

The biohub investigators must post their manuscripts on open-access preprint servers, such as the arXiv, as soon as they submit the paper to a peer-reviewed journal. But researchers are permitted to file for patents, which would be owned jointly by the biohub and the scientists’ home institution.

from Nature - 'Riskiest ideas' win $50 million from Chan Zuckerberg Biohub - February 8, 2017

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Manager of Computational Biology, Jeremy Freeman, has made some statements about making data and code available.

Will all your research be peer-reviewed, published in journals and published for all to see?
We are absolutely committed to open dissemination of data and code and knowledge; that’s something I have been committed to all the time I’ve been a scientist.

The Guardian - Mark Zuckerberg’s man in the lab: ‘I want science to happen faster’ - March 5, 2017

Scientific research is still shared using a system developed more than a hundred years ago: the academic paper. “That’s how we disseminate knowledge, it’s a PDF document,” Freeman said. The data, the code and the interactive elements of the research should all be interactive, he argued. “There’s an obvious need to modernise and scale-up the technology we’re using,” Freeman said.

Wired - Meet the man tasked with speeding-up science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative - March 12, 2017

So for the moment it looks like preprints, open code (open source?) and open data.  But still not clear about open access.

A unified position statement from Chan Zuckerberg on their website about their open science approach would provide some clarity.  This could be a page along the lines of the Gates Foundation Open Access Policy.

UPDATE 2017-04-26: An announcement today from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) that Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will be providing funding for the development and expansion of the bioRxiv preprints server and that "All software developed through this collaboration will be made available as open source."

Nature has a bit more information in BioRxiv preprint server gets cash boost from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, including the possibility of better enabling bioRxiv for text mining and connecting it to Meta.

Previously:
February 17, 2017  Many preprint services