This article examines the actual situation and the effect of electronic media in scholarly communication. Especially it focuses on the characteristics of scientific communication. Japanese researchers in medicine, physics, psychology, history, economics use electronic media (e-mail, mailing list, WWW sites, online journal), but the extent to which they are used varies among scientists, depending on the field of science, type of media, research style and other factors. Uses of electronic media in 'informal communication' (e.g. e-mail) have spread rapidly, but the situation in 'formal communication' is complex. Almost current electronic journals are primarily based on the system of traditional scholarly journal in print.
　Commercial publishers or societies edit electronic journals, and they are disseminated through academic libraries. They are electronic media, but may not a substantial new system of academic information flow. E-print archive at the Los Alamos National Laboratory is a preprint archive system by electronic means, appears to be successful. This system, however, is considered to be a supplement of traditional scholarly journal by scientists using it. Quite a new dissemination system of academic information, such as Pub Med Central in NIH has also been proposed. It does not work actually, but could be a new perspective in scientific communication.

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　Firstly, the paper points out that increasing works indicates an emerging field of the history of information science. Then it is discussed that to build the field into an integrated field on the history for information science, we have to study total history from the viewpoint of information science. To do this, it is recommended to regard the history of information science as studying the historical factors in " informational environments" and to link seamlessly with the history of media and communications, i.e., studies in people surrounded by such environments.

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　Not few suggestions have ever been made on the definition of "information". But most of them are given with multi-levels-meanings. It must be defined to cover the whole spectrum of meanings by a single phase. Considering a similarity among "time", possibility" and "information" in the aspect of difficulty to define their essence, the author introduced a new concept of anti-information" which is equal to possibility. The anti-information is considered to be "con-formed" to the existence to be " in-formed". Some parts of anti-information turns out to be information.＜br/＞ 　This hypothesis enhances the significance of information, making the concept of Norbert Wiener that the whole world is consisted of material, energy and information more meaningful.

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