An on-line journal is a journal whose entire contents is accessible to readers over the Internet. Major academic journals in Europe and the US are becoming increasingly available in on-line formats, and there is growing interest in Japan in making journals - especially English-language journals - available on-line. Describing an on-line journal is difficult to do with mere words. More can be learned through an actual visit to an on-line journal web site, such as HighWire (http://highwire.stanford.edu). There you can search for articles from innumerable journals, and view the full contents of the articles contained therein.

There are many advantages to making academic information available on-line. First, on-line journals can be published on the Internet much more quickly than paper-based journals. Because they do not need to be printed and bound, their publication time is much shorter than conventional journals. With the increasingly intense struggle to be the first to produce new information, the more rapid publication of journals is expected and even needed to keep pace with the times.

Some question whether it is appropriate to publish articles only over the Internet without making them available in paper format. Others are concerned that on-line journals are inferior to preprint servers, which are being developed in fields like physics where speed is the top priority. However, since preprint servers automatically disclose submitted articles, they provide no referee. In other words, this is a world where anything, simply by being said, may take on the appearance of having been generally accepted. On-line journals, however, have referees who determine whether or not to publish an article on the server. This allows them to maintain a certain level of quality and authority without sacrificing speed. Today's electronic journals are usually available in printed form either at the same time as or shortly after their electronic counterparts. In this sense, they are no different from their paper-based predecessors.

For readers, on-line journals offer outstanding convenience when it comes to content searching. It goes without saying that the various searching tools available over the Internet offer unprecedented convenience, but computers can also be used effectively to search for academic articles. It is very difficult to use the existing journal searching framework to find particular articles from among the many that exist because the search range is either too narrow or too poad. On-line journals, however, allow computer users to perform a keyword search to find related articles from journals all over the world.

One notable advantage of on-line journals is that they can offer links to cited references to facilitate searching. Users can simply click on the appropriate citation number from the bibliography located at the end of an article to view the content of the document cited. The ability to search reference works is the most convenient merit of on-line journals. A reader of a conventional printed journal who wants to refer to the text of a cited work often does not have access to that work. They might find the citation if it is contained in a journal they happen to have on hand, but otherwise they have to go to great lengths to either request a copy of the citation from the author or to find the material at a nearby university. Even if the cited work is owned by the reader, they may not be able to find it if their own bookshelves are not well organized. Citations can be referenced immediately in an on-line journal, however. It is no exaggeration to say that Internet hyperlinks were originally created precisely to serve the purpose of pointing users to necessary reference materials.

Links to citations are of great significance in terms of promoting the more widespread creation of on-line journals. That is, links can only be provided to sources that are available on-line and cannot be provided to sources that are not yet available on-line. Because citation links will increase the likelihood that a reference work will be ''discovered,'' works that are not available on-line and that are thus hidden from this citation link network will be little better off than unpublished works. It is precisely for this reason that the academic journals in the US and Europe are proceeding rapidly toward on-line availability.

First we are good at academic printing, especially old Japanese texts. As in English, and other Languages,
Old Japanese was very different from modern Japanese. Although the demand for old Japanese text is very few,
they are needed in academic fields. We are experienced printers of old Japanese.
Simultaneously we are accustomed to Chinese characters. Though Many Chinese characters are used in modern
Japanese text, original Chinese characters are also different from modern Japanese usage of Chinese character.
A detailed explanation will be on a later part.

And Mathematical language is also a strong point. Moreover we are good at English printing.

Of course Most of the US and UK printers are better at English printing than us., Chinese printers are better at
Chinese printing than us. But Japanese, Chinese, English, all of them can be printed in our factory. It is our
strongest point.
Now we are accustomed to the electronic publishing. We were partner of UK’s Oxford University Press. In 1999
we joined in partnership with Oxford, and introduced on-line journal techniques. May be we are the most
experienced On-line journal company in Japan.

This is traditional but innovative Nakanishi printing, as you can see on the next photo.

The world's on-line journals today are primarily being developed by academic publishing companies. Given the many benefits of on-line journals, these publishers expect the future role of publishing companies to shift from paper-based to digital formats, and are thus becoming very active in this field. Generally speaking, publishers are digitizing their paper-based journals, making them available via their own servers, and providing links between journals. Typical examples of such efforts are Blackwell's SYNERGY and Elsevire's Science Direct. Among non-commercial publishers, by contrast, are the well-known activities of the HighWire Consortium centered around Stanford University.

Today, on-line journal servers are competing over who can provide the most links to cited sources. On-line journal server hosts are forming alliances and trying to lure influential journals to their servers. It is possible to provide links to other companies' servers, but it is easier in terms of copyrights and other issues for hosts to provide links to on-line journals offered on their own servers. Also, having influential journals that have a high citation rate helps improve the recognition rate of the entire server. In this sense, on-line journals may prove to be a hotly contested arena that can make or peak a publishing company in the 21st century.

In Japan, the shift toward journal digitalization is happening at a more sluggish pace, perhaps because publishing companies are not taking the lead in producing academic journals. Nonetheless, stimulated by European and American movements, there not only have been examples like Plant and Cell Physiology, a journal put on-line by European and American academic publishers which will be discussed below, but also many examples of academic societies that maintain their own servers. The National Institute of Informatics (www.nacsis.http://ac.jp/olj/index.html, formerly the National Center for Science Information Systems) has been working to establish a database of images of academic journals that can serve as a digital lipary. Even the Japan Science and Technology Corporation (www.jstage.jst.go.jp/ja/), an affiliated organization of the Science and Technology Agency, operates a server on which it has created and made on-line journals available using data from various academic societies and associations. (As of April 2001, both of these will be affiliated with the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Integration is under consideration.)

Like their European and American counterparts, these publicly offered on-line journal servers also offer a host of cited reference links. If links to worldwide on-line journals can also be added, they will make a significant contribution to introducing reference materials from Japan to the rest of the world.