kristoff@NET.BIO.NET (David Kristofferson) (04/26/89)
The BIO-JOURNALS newsgroup, the latest addition to the BIOSCI newsgroup network, is ready for operation. On BITNET the group goes under the name of BIO-JRNL and on USENET it is called bionet.journals.contents. The purpose of this group is to disseminate the table of contents of biological journals prior to their appearance in hardcopy form. In this respect the group is not really a forum for discussion, but instead a medium of distribution for this material. Currently I have made arrangements with the American Society for Microbiology to distribute the contents of the Journal of Virology, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and the Journal of Bacteriology about two weeks in advance of publication. In addition IRL press is contributing the contents of Computer Applications in the BioSciences (CABIOS) and discussions are underway with them to include Nucleic Acids Research and the EMBO Journal as well. If any of the readers of this newsgroup have professional connections with any other major journal and would like to participate in this effort, I would be happy to hear from you. Please send e-mail to me at kristoff@net.bio.net. All that is needed to participate is the submission of the table of contents in ASCII format from your journal by e-mail or diskette. We are encouraging the submissions to standardize on a subset of Medline format (discussions still underway on this) so that the information can be read by reference database software. I also wish to encourage readers who write software for this task to contribute it for distribution via the BIONET anonymous FTP directory at net.bio.net. It is, with our limited resources, not our intention to make this newsgroup home to every journal in print. Our immediate goal is simply to make available the contents of the most widely used biological journals. In this regards, I would appreciate it if readers would send me (to kristoff@net.bio.net, NOT to the newsgroup!!!) their top five "favorite journals" so that we can focus our efforts and limited "recruiting" resources. I also wish to reemphasize my appeal above. If this group is to expand, it will rely considerably on the good will and efforts of people at the various publishing companies. I have only a small amount of time each day to devote to this work, but collectively our individual efforts can be magnified. If you do not receive this group over some kind of news network such as USENET and need to receive direct mailings of messages, you can subscribe to the group by sending your request to one of the following addresses. Please chose the most convenient geographical and network location. Address Location Network ------- -------- ------- biosci@irlearn.ucd.ie Ireland EARN/BITNET biosci@uk.ac.daresbury U.K. JANET biosci@bmc.uu.se Sweden Internet biosci@net.bio.net U.S.A. Internet/BITNET Note that EARN/BITNET users may also access a LISTSERV program at IRLEARN in Ireland. To subscribe there, send a message to LISTSERV@IRLEARN or LISTSERV@IRLEARN.UCD.IE containing the line SUBSCRIBE BIO$JRNL your_personal_name in the body of the message. Please note that this technique can ONLY BE USED AT IRLEARN and not at any of the other BIOSCI nodes above. Best wishes for a successful venture! I expect the next three tables of contents to be posted in about two and a half weeks.