The 41st IATUL Conference was held at the Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Engenharia, Portugal, from 13 to 15 July 2021 (online format).

The emergence of movements such as Open Science, Open Innovation, and Citizen Science highlights how society benefits when higher education institutions expand access to research and teaching. Ongoing engagement and collaboration between universities and communities are essential components of these open initiatives. The recent developments in research to fight COVID-19 emphasize the advantages of open collaboration. Academic libraries worldwide are playing vital roles in facilitating these initiatives by developing new and innovative services and infrastructure. The overall themes for the conference were:

• Expanding information and digital literacies
• Library spaces and services advancing innovation and engagement
• Partnerships with communities, local and global
• Library strategies and actions supporting open science and collaboration
• Open Science: communicating and measuring impact beyond the university
• Workforce development in open science practices (repositories, presses, RDM and more)
• Innovative library responses to pandemic situation

Proceedings of the conference are available in the IATUL repository.