The article discusses the format of electronic scholarly journals and publications focused on online presentation of research results. Issues of creating tools for electronic scholarly publishing are considered. Problems related to the need for including multimedia data are described. An approach to creating an online multimedia designer of the article is considered, online tools of the editor and author of the article are proposed. The organization of the component structure of the article on the basis of fields, which allows for effective presentation and citation, is proposed. With this approach, embedded media objects can be organized into self-sufficient collections. An additional condition for the formation of the article is an online layout tool based on a set of functional components. Consideration of multimedia components of the article as separate entities of the data structure gives flexible possibilities of their visual interactive representation. An additional advantage of the component approach is the ability to expand the range of types of multimedia objects. A working prototype of a multimedia scholarly publication is presented as the implementation of the described approach. The prototype of the journal serves as a starting point for the development of the component model and demonstrates the first stage of development.