athel at ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr (Athel Cornish-Bowden) wrote in message news:<v0300780ab81ef1a1b4c8@[10.234.32.112]>...
> On the general issue of why this group is in such poor health there are a
> number of not necessarily related points I think it worth making:
>> 1. Nearly all the BioNet groups I look at are in much worse shape now than
> they were about three years ago. Even those that are still quite lively
> (e.g. the microbiology group) are less so than they were even a year ago. I
> do NOT notice any similar trend in the other (non-biological) groups I
> visit, e.g. on yahoo or google groups. Maybe it's just that biologists are
> a bit disillusioned with news groups, finding that they are not living up
> to their promise of a few years ago. I hope that is not true, but it's
> certainly not just this group that has fallen on bad times.
I think that something else might be happening. Rather then biology
researchers being disillusioned or disappointed with Usenet groups
(e.g., bionet.*), they simply might be using other -- previously
unavailable -- electronic resources to do their work.
I noticed over the last three years that research libraries, certainly
those I have been using, dramatically increased the number of
full-text online journals accessible from the laboratory, office, or
home. Also, people working on large campuses now have online access
to bibliographic databases such as WebOfScience (formerly "Science
Citation Index"), SciFinder Scholar (formerly "STN Express / Chemical
Abstracts Service [CAS] Online"), and others.
These relatively new developments to some extent reduce the need to go
to Usenet when asking questions such as "what's a good review paper on
X", or "what buffer is used for experiment Y", or "how long do you
incubate Z".
---
Perhaps the original informal and collaborative character of the
entire Usenet network (including, formerly, the bionet.* family of
Usenet groups) is very much alive in areas where developments are
somewhat faster than in biochemistry, or where there is no formal
literature to speak of. (Just take a look at one of the groups I have
been reading for a few years, news://comp.lang.c++. There's about 200
messages every day, most of them very topical. Amazingly, no spam.
No moderator either.)
- Petr
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