(27 May 2026) For most of the history of scholarly publishing, the definition of “end user” was stable enough that no one thought to question it. The user was a researcher, a student, a clinician, a librarian: a human being who navigated a platform, read content, and formed their own judgments. Everything downstream of that assumption, like platform design, metadata strategy, discovery architecture, and usage reporting, was built around it.
That assumption is no longer sufficient. The shift isn’t just in where users begin their research, it’s in who “users” even refers to, what they’re looking for when they arrive, and what it means to successfully serve them. Drawing on recent conversations with publishers implementing AI discovery tools, library professionals watching student behavior change in real time, technologists building connector infrastructure, and standards bodies working to make usage measurement coherent again, I see a picture emerging that has a clear center of gravity: the user has changed faster than the systems designed to serve them, and the gap between the two is where most of the difficult work is happening.
Scholarly Kitchen has the article in full.
