An Overview of the 2021 NISO Plus Conference: Global connections and global conversations

This paper offers an overview of the highlights of the 2021 NISO Plus Annual Conference that was held virtually from February 22 – February 25, 2021. This was the second NISO Plus annual conference. The first one was held in 2020 and replaced what would have been the 62nd Annual NFAIS conference, but with the merger of NISO and NFAIS in June 2019 the conference was renamed NISO Plus and took on a new format. Little did they know that the second conference would have to be held virtually while the world was battling a global pandemic. The 2021 audience represented a 400% increase over the 2020 in-person attendance. There was no general theme, but there was a topic for everyone working in the information ecosystem - from the practical subjects of standards and metadata quality to preprints to information privacy and ultimately to the impact of Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning on scholarly communication. With speakers from around the world and across time zones and continents, it was truly a global conversation!