1 1 3 3 5 8 10 14 16 21 25 27 Editorial It is the end of 1998 and its been an interesting year. EMBnet celebrated its tenth anniversary. The genome of Caenorhabditis elegans was finally finished, more or less on schedule. After several static years, a new gapped version of Blast was released. SRS and Swissprot both went commercial. Although commercialisation is often viewed as a "bad thing" by academics, it can have some very positive fallout. If carried out sensibly it should guarantee income enough to ensure continuity. It should also provide the salaries of those who will continue to maintain and develop products which are useful to the entire community. Getting paid also puts an obligation on the product or service provider: to write that tedious but necessary manual and documentation, and to respond to users questions and suggestions quickly and effectively. It is obvious to those of us in the EMBnet community that the infrastructure which EMBnet nodes provide is an essential part of world bioinformatics. Training, documentation , advice, consultancy, specialised and local databases, software development and hardware maintenance are all vital underpinnings of effective research. Unfortunately, those who use and appreciate the services that the nodes provide are rarely those responsible for supporting and funding them. So we have seen several disruptive "rationalisations" across our community in recent months. SEQNET, the United Kingdom National Node, has been united with the HGMP-RC, one of the Specialist EMBnet Nodes located on the Hinxton Genome Campus. Let us hope that this merger will be transparent to users and have all the positive benefits that the responsible funding agencies hope for and expect. A much less agreeable and well-planned change has occurred at the Netherlands EMBnet node. We understand that the manager of the EMBnet grant from the European Union, Jan Noordik, is on "indefinite leave of absence" while the role of the CAOS/CAMM Centre is reconsidered. It is to be sincerely hoped that such local goings-on will not have an adverse effect on EMBnet as a whole; EMBnet cannot and should not interfere in local arrangements. Jan has been a tireless supporter and promoter of EMBnet over the last decade. He deserves and will surely receive the support of the entire EMBnet community. This issue of embnet.news gives us a seasonal overview of networks in a big country by Christoph Sensen. An interview with Peter Stoehr, …