[IRTalk] Gaëlle Béquet: Building the infrastructure nobody sees

[Ina Smith]

https://www.researchinformation.info/analysis-opinion/gaelle-bequet-building-the-infrastructure-nobody-sees/

The article profiles Gaëlle Béquet, Executive Director of the ISSN International Centre, and highlights the largely invisible infrastructure that underpins scholarly communication. Béquet argues that the ISSN is far more than a journal identifier: it is part of a global sociotechnical system linking publishers, libraries, indexing services, researchers, standards bodies and digital platforms. Reliable identifiers, authoritative metadata, interoperability and preservation are essential for making research Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) and for enabling services such as DOAJ, Crossref, Scopus, Web of Science and library catalogues to function effectively. The article also stresses the growing importance of cleaning and improving legacy metadata, connecting identifiers such as ISSN, DOI, ORCID and ROR, and ensuring that smaller and less-resourced publishers are not disadvantaged by scholarly infrastructure. Béquet sees AI as offering useful possibilities for metadata and research communication, but also warns that it makes producing poor-quality or misleading scholarship easier, increasing the need for trusted metadata, authoritative preservation and mechanisms for identifying fraudulent or cloned journals. Ultimately, she argues that scholarly publishing increasingly depends on infrastructure that researchers rarely notice, but whose quality, sustainability and interoperability are fundamental to trust, discovery, preservation and research integrity.


Ina Smith

Programme Officer: Open Science and Open Infrastructure

Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)



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Email: ina at assaf.org.za



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