Gaëlle Béquet: Building the infrastructure nobody sees
In the fourth of our Women in Scholarly Communications series, we meet Gaëlle Béquet, Director of ISSN International Centre
Supported by Cactus Communications
Gaëlle Béquet didn’t originally plan to become a librarian.
She was studying international relations at the Sorbonne and paying her way with temporary jobs in university libraries around Paris. “It was then that I decided to sit the national competitive examination for librarians, which I passed,” she recalls.
The international side of her career also has deep roots. Some of her first encounters with the wider world came through books: The Odyssey, which she discovered at the age of 10, then Gulliver’s Travels and the voyages of Sinbad the Sailor. Later came the travel writing of women such as Ella Maillart and Alexandra David-Néel.
Her father travelled extensively for work, and Gaëlle studied English before completing her international relations degree. Internationalism would crop up repeatedly in her subsequent career, including in roles at France’s Ministry of Culture and the École des Chartes. She sees her current position at the ISSN International Centre as bringing those different strands together: information science, professional expertise and a long-standing interest in international cooperation.
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An identifier as a social system
Gaëlle’s doctoral research examined European digital libraries and the impact of the Google Books project as a competitor to national libraries. Along the way she encountered ideas that still influence the way she thinks about the ISSN: the Social Construction of Technology theory associated with Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, and Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer’s Boundary Object Theory.
An identifier, in this view, is not simply a technical object. The rules surrounding the ISSN, the metadata attached to it and the ways people use it have developed through decades of interaction between publishers, national libraries, research centres, indexing services and standards organisations.
Cataloguers, publishers and software developers sit alongside databases, APIs, bibliographic records, standards and formats such as MARC and RDF.
Gaëlle describes the ISSN as a “boundary object”: something different communities can use in different ways while sharing enough of an understanding to work together.
“The same identifier is used by very different professional communities – librarians, publishers, subscription agencies, indexing platforms, digital archives, researchers, information systems and statistical bodies – that pursue distinct objectives but can cooperate through a shared reference,” she explains.
The International Centre maintains the rules and coordinates practices across almost 100 National Centres, making sure organisations with very different priorities can continue to rely on the same identifier.
For Gaëlle, that complexity is part of the attraction. At the International Centre she works with specialists in bibliographic standardisation, publishing and IT, as well as experts in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence and consultants in fields ranging from international administrative law to management and marketing. “I learn a great deal every day,” she says.
The infrastructure beneath scholarly publishing
The ISSN is fundamental to much of the machinery behind scholarly communication. The ISSN celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2025 and is the oldest of the major identifiers after the ISBN. Researchers encounter ISSNs when searching for journals, conducting bibliometric studies or asking their library to acquire a title. Less obvious are the dependencies behind those activities.
“For an article in a particular journal to receive a DOI, and for a journal to be indexed in DOAJ, Scopus, Web of Science or library catalogues generally, a serial publication must first have an ISSN,” Gaëlle says.
Today, 98 National Centres receive identification requests from publishers or assign ISSNs through mechanisms including legal deposit. “The ISSN is genuinely an indispensable identifier within the scholarly publishing ecosystem.”
Indispensable infrastructure is often invisible – researchers rarely need to think about the systems allowing them to discover, access, cite and reuse information until something goes wrong. Gaëlle links this to the FAIR principles. If scholarly information is to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, it needs persistent identifiers, good metadata, controlled vocabularies and semantic technologies underneath it.
“The ISSN International Centre and its network are a typical FAIR infrastructure,” she says.
The identifier is only one part of that. The Centre also supplies authoritative metadata and mechanisms that allow different information systems to talk to one another.
Opening up the ISSN
The way the Centre measures its success has changed too – simply counting the number of identifiers assigned is no longer enough.
In 2018, part of its metadata was opened through a new online portal and its economic model changed alongside it. Not all ISSN metadata is freely available: subscriptions provide around a third of the Centre’s annual budget. An updated ISSN Manual was completed in 2025, while a networked metadata-production tool created in 2022 is being used to improve records, including reducing broken URLs for online resources. A new portal followed at the beginning of 2026 and remains under development.
Gaëlle wants the Centre to be understood as part of a wider infrastructure for producing, discovering and preserving scholarly resources. Partnerships with Crossref, DOAJ, Latindex, CLOCKSS and Portico are central to that approach.
But the level of cooperation between publishers, libraries and technology providers varies widely between countries. Forums such as EDItEUR in the UK and NISO in the US offer neutral territory where different parts of the industry can work together, but participation takes time and money.
“An organisation must have sufficient scale and the human, technical and financial resources required to participate in projects or working groups,” Gaëlle observes.
The International Centre participates in NISO discussions itself, including recommended practices around Transfer and the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project.
The metadata problem
The ISSN database is now 50 years old. Records created at different points in that time inevitably reflect different systems, conventions and working practices, which need to be aligned. Gaëlle calls it an “unrewarding task” – which is one reason it can be neglected.
Cleaning old records by hand is difficult when resources are tight. Giving the job entirely to machines brings different risks. Gaëlle expects the answer to be a combination of human expertise with AI-driven alignment, with finding that balance among the objectives in the Centre’s 2029 Action Plan.
She has seen a much bigger transformation in access to research during her career. A researcher can now move from a citation to the referenced work almost immediately and make a quick judgement about whether it is useful. She describes that as a “genuine revolution” and experienced the benefits herself while completing her doctorate in four years.
Open access has brought another challenge for the ISSN Network. As established publishers moved from print to paid digital products and then towards free-to-read content, a new generation of born-digital publishers was emerging outside the organisations the network traditionally knew.
One response was ROAD, the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources, established with UNESCO project funding under former director Françoise Pellé. It now contains more than 60,000 titles and its metadata is openly available.
An increasingly interconnected world
Scholarly communication now contains an expanding collection of identifiers: ISSN, DOI, ORCID, ISNI, ROR and RAID among them.
For Gaëlle, that proliferation is partly a consequence of how international research has become. Identifiers allow information and systems to be connected across borders. What is more difficult is connecting them with national infrastructures often designed around domestic policy or research-assessment requirements.
Organisations also have very different resources, of course. Large publishers can invest heavily in metadata. Gaëlle points to Springer Nature, with which the Centre has a partnership, as one example. Small publishers face very different economics.
Meanwhile, publishers are increasingly conscious that their content is an asset wanted by AI companies. That content needs to be identifiable. It may need protection against misappropriation, it may be commercialised, and it needs to be preserved authentically over the long term. “Metadata consequently becomes indispensable,” she says.
Gaëlle argues that infrastructure providers also have a responsibility not to make existing inequalities worse. The ISSN International Centre adjusts publisher costs according to economic circumstances, while open-source technology can help. The Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems is an example of infrastructure accessible to publishers without the resources of the industry’s largest players.
AI, trust and authenticity
Artificial intelligence has made many of these questions more urgent. Gaëlle is far from dismissive of the technology – AI tools can help researchers express their findings more effectively, translate their writing, explore new avenues and bring different approaches together.
But AI also makes it dramatically cheaper and easier to produce bad scholarship at scale: “Some unscrupulous publishers and authors misuse these agents to compile research and generate articles of little value, or even outright misleading articles,” she warns. “The principal risk, in my view, is that good research will be drowned out by poor research.”
Trusted metadata has a role here, but Gaëlle thinks preserving authoritative content may be even more important. Standards including PREMIS, METS and MODS will need to develop as circumstances change.
The ISSN Network is increasingly encountering cases where publishers create near-identical copies of legitimate journal websites, appropriate publication titles, or retain the ISSN and other characteristics of the original title.
The Centre is discussing with colleagues on the MARC 21 Advisory Committee whether metadata should carry notes about disputes between publishers. That could give users a warning where intellectual-property or ownership disputes make it impossible to produce wholly reliable metadata.
Among the questions surrounding AI, there is also one particularly old-fashioned problem Gaëlle would like publishers to address: use ISSNs properly. Print and online versions of the same publication have different identifiers. Publishers still mix them up. Downstream, that can cause problems both in identifying a resource accurately and preserving it for the long term.
What comes next?
Gaëlle does not expect the journal to disappear any time soon. Researchers still need journal publications for career progression and, despite DORA and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), conventional bibliometric assessment remains entrenched.
Publication and citation counts still matter, as does journal prestige – and databases such as Web of Science and Scopus continue to play an important part in assessment.
But there are signs of movement: “Automatic reliance on journal prestige and database-derived indicators is increasingly difficult to defend,” Gaëlle argues, adding that contextualised peer review, narrative evidence and recognition of a wider range of research contributions are becoming more institutionalised.
Gaëlle’s years working internationally have also left her with a fairly uncomplicated view of leadership. “It does rely on work,” she asserts. A leader who will not prepare properly, take on difficult problems and sustain the required effort will eventually lose credibility. Hard work, in her view, demonstrates competence and respect for colleagues.
There is also accountability – particularly important in an international organisation funded in part by member states. A leader has to take responsibility for the organisation’s performance and wellbeing, give it meaningful direction, build trust and make judgements when the answer is not obvious.
Asked about her proudest achievement, Gaëlle says she hopes she has helped re-establish “the full importance and visibility of the ISSN International Centre, its network and the ISSN itself as a major sociotechnical system in the field of scholarly communication”.
Her advice to people coming into library and information science reflects how far the profession has travelled from the traditional image of librarianship: develop scientific skills, learn how to manipulate data and communicate statistics, or learn how to manage a publishing platform.
And when she wants nothing to do with identifiers, metadata, standards or international infrastructure? “Dancing, running, swimming! I like salsa; I like tango. Just yesterday evening I was dancing on the banks of the Seine, with a cool breeze coming off the river. It feels fantastic.”
To conclude, Gaëlle says another milestone is already in sight. Asked what she would like to have achieved if this conversation were repeated in another 10 years, Gaëlle wants to have celebrated the International Centre’s 60th anniversary – and by then, to have strengthened interoperability between the ISSN and the growing constellation of identifiers on which global scholarly communication increasingly depends.
Interview by Tim Gillett