Bionet shutdown at IU and GenBank Release announcements

[Cavanaugh, Mark (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [E]]

As you have recently read in posts by Don Gilbert, Bionet activities
at Indiana University will no longer be supported as of April 6 2019,
and the future of Bionet is uncertain.

Since this 'genbankb' list is primarily used for announcements of the
availability of GenBank releases, I thought it might be helpful to
summarize some of the other announcement channels used by NCBI:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pg/ncbi.nlm/posts/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ncbi

The NCBI Insights Blog: https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

Example blog post for the GenBank 230.0 announcement:

https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2019/03/14/genbank-release-230-available-file-size-changes/

It is also possible to monitor for GenBank release availability via
this file at the NCBI FTP site:

ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/GB_Release_Number

The timestamp of this file is updated when a new release is installed.

We realize that none of these methods have the convenience of an
email delivered to your inbox... And social media posts from NCBI
are sometimes not very prompt (individual employees like myself
aren't typically allowed to post). We *are* hopeful that release
announcements can be streamlined, however.

If you feel that some type of email-based announcement mechanism is
important to your work, please let us know at NCBI's Help Desk. You'll
find a link for it at this page:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/home/about/contact/

With gratitude for the many years of Bionet service, and for
Don Gilbert's central role,

Mark Cavanaugh
GenBank
NCBI/NLM/NIH/HHS