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 3.28. Reducing the role of intermediaries in such ways is sometimes referred to as ‘disintermediation’. But these changes have not eliminated the need for intermediaries, for a variety of reasons including the continuing need for quality assurance of content, and for effective search and navigation systems to guide readers to the content they want. Intermediaries develop and invest in such services, and they need to operate under business models that provide the revenues that enable them to do so. But all are operating in an environment where they face repeated questioning of the value of the services they provide. They also face insistent demands for greater customer focus, even as many of the services they provide are increasingly less-visible to authors and readers. The digital revolution has also brought the need for new services in areas such as digital preservation: the role of research libraries in ensuring the long-term preservation of print does not readily transfer to digital content, and while services such as Portico and the edepot at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands have made considerable progress, we are still some way from a position where there are robust arrangements in place for the long term preservation of digital copies of all issues of all journal titles so that they remain accessible for future generations. Further investment is likely to be needed in this area.

3.29. Behaviours and expectations. We have already noted that researchers now read many more articles than they did twenty years ago. They also make extensive use of journals and other material to which they did not have access the print era. But how they read and navigate has changed too. They read on screen as well as in print, bouncing from one site to another, ‘power-browsing’ through content and spending less time reading individual items. But researchers are now more likely to navigate to the content they want through use of a gateway service or search engine rather than by browsing through the tables of contents of individual journals. And they expect that when they discover material that looks relevant to their work, they will be able to access the full text immediately without charge: one of the key frustrations they express is when that expectation is thwarted. A growing minority, as we have seen, also want to use a variety of tools to organise and manipulate the content they find.

3.30. On the whole, however, researchers operate in an environment where information is abundant, and face challenges in dealing with that abundance. In the research communications landscape, as elsewhere, there is thus growing interest in ideas