The paper discusses requirements for websites of academic journals, their structures and fillings. First of all, we analyze scenarios of behavior of various categories of readers who are using the Internet. From this analysis it is concluded on the need to implement various functional opportunities of journal websites. Described in detail the necessary relationship between main structural components of the journal: journal – issue – section – article as well as the infrastructure of journal websites. We substantiated the necessity of filling the fullest information about authors and meta-data of articles to optimize operation of search engines. Speaking on the site functional options we highlight the need to create bibliographic descriptions of articles in the CoinS format (that is a special international format). Requirements of international citation systems for journal sites are given. The new version of the site of the journal Polic. Political Studies illustrates our approaches to discussed problems. The Open Journal System is a platform for creating websites for journals considered, as well as its advantages and disadvantages analyzed.