Our life in the third millennium is swiftly changing our possibilities and habits. Traditional books have not been forgotten, we buy magazines and newspapers, admire paintings and photographs, but …because of the world-wide web and e-mail many people acquired new unprecedented and previously unconceivable capabilities. So far information products in the Internet environment are in 90% of cases employed by the majority of users only for solving operational tasks and high-speed communication with each other. Such democratic cooperation developing beyond political and economic limits is highly esteemed in BioDat, where you can witness buildup of the voluntary partnership system in the sphere of exchanging and providing information. While supporting traditional possibilities of publication and thus ensuring greater convenience for the interaction among its partners, BioDat is offering a new type of service - on-line journal for corporate work of the researchers from the remote locations.

           First of all, publication in the on-line journal means promptness. You send your material, we make it up and publish within one or two days - no "waiting lines" of many months. It also means accessibility - your work can be read by any interested person in any place of the world. The circulation is also different - not just three hundred copies of a special compilation distributed within a narrow circle of specialists, but round-the-clock access to hundreds of millions of Internet users. And lastly, an on-line journal implies an interactive system. You can criticize any information, make additions, express your opinion - everything will be published not somewhere or some time in other issues of the journal, but immediately in the same package with the original publication. This way each article in prospect can turn into a whole discussion group, and, upon availability of material resources, into independent projects - compilations with commonness of subjects or regional coverage, conferences, scientific or public programs. Even now we can say that the articles prepared in accordance with the requirements of academic magazines and being undoubtedly of interest to such magazines will be recommended for republication in the periodicals of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, including Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences. Geographical Series. Of practical importance for the authors is the fact that in Russia BioDat serves as an official tool of the intermediation mechanism and scientific and information exchange for the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Biodiversity.

           The on-line journal supplements system of partners' joint work created at BioDat including tools for independent placement on the Web of the results of one's personal observations, notes, comments, thematic bibliographic compilations, data about oneself and one's experience. If you have any ideas regarding directions of the on-line journal development we will be glad to discuss them at our Forum.