Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uwmcsd1!ig!kristoff
From: kristoff@presto.ig.com (David Kristofferson)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: BIONET?
Message-ID: <6700@ig.ig.com>
Date: 8 Jul 88 23:22:47 GMT
References: <5421@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <3374@phri.UUCP>
Organization: IntelliGenetics Inc., Mtn. View, Ca.
Lines: 63

>	There is a bionet top-level news distribution on usenet which is
>gatewayed (bi-directionally, I think) from the various BIONET bboards.  To
>get the bionet groups, all you have to do is find a news neighbor and ask
>them to send them to you.  If you can't find a closer site, we would be
>willing to set up a uucp link just to send you those groups.  The traffic
>is pretty light (in fact, sometimes I wonder if anybody uses them at all).
>There are a number of NNTP sites which get bionet as well.
>-- 
>Roy Smith, System Administrator
>Public Health Research Institute
>{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net
>"The connector is the network"

Roy is correct that the newsgroups are gatewayed bi-directionally from
the ARPANET/BITNET distribution.  BIONET has helped many sites get
feeds for this purpose.  The usage is light (as viewed by a computer
scientist) on some of the special interest newsgroups because people
are still just learning about their existence.  Several of the groups
are fairly heavily utilized as far as biological newsgroups go, but
they are definitely lightly used compared to those in use by computer
scientists.  For example, I would guess that the total number of
messages on the various special interest groups may exceed sci.bio and
is growing rapidly.  The molecular biology community is just being
introduced to this type of technology.  I expect rapid growth in the
use of these groups or the next year or two.  A new biological bboard
network termed BIOSCI has been established and copies of messages on
these groups are being distributed automatically via a variety of
networks (ARPANET,BITNET,JANET,EARN) worldwide.

The bionet.* newsgroups were set up as specialized forums for research
scientists since the load of messages on general newsgroups may be
more than some researchers want to take the time to read.  The
philosophy behind the groups is really to provide special interest
groups for researchers in technical areas of molecular biology.  This
idea is just beginning to catch on among scientists in this field.

Dave Kristofferson
BIONET Resource Manager
kristofferson@bionet-20.arpa

Equivalences of the Unix USENET newsgroup names to the ARPANET mailing
list names follow:

 bionet.general  .....................BIONET-NEWS (changing to BIONEWS)
 bionet.jobs  ........................EMPLOYMENT
 bionet.molbio.news  .................RESEARCH-NEWS
 bionet.molbio.seqnet  ...............SEQNET
 bionet.molbio.bio-matrix  ...........BIO-MATRIX
 bionet.molbio.methds-reagnts  .......METHODS-AND-REAGANTS
 bionet.molbio.genbank  ..............GENBANK-BB
 bionet.molbio.embldatabank  .........EMBL-DATABANK
 bionet.molbio.pir  ..................PIR
 bionet.molbio.evolution  ............MOLECULAR-EVOLUTION
 bionet.molbio.gene-express  .........GENE-EXPRESSION
 bionet.molbio.gene-org  .............GENOMIC-ORGANIZATION
 bionet.molbio.oncogenes  ............ONCOGENES
 bionet.molbio.plant  ................PLANT-GENETICS
 bionet.molbio.proteins  .............PROTEIN-ANALYSIS
 bionet.molbio.yeast  ................YEAST-GENETICS
 bionet.sci-resources  ...............SCIENCE-RESOURCES
 bionet.software.pc  .................PC-SOFTWARE
 bionet.software.pc.comm  ............PC-COMMUNICATION
 bionet.software.contrib  ............CONTRIBUTED-SOFTWARE