With over 15 years of experience in open access, open science, and open data, Gürdal served as President of the Anatolian University Libraries Consortium (ANKOS) from 2008 to 2012 and coordinated the ANKOS Open Access and Institutional Repositories Working Group from 2008 to 2018. He is also a member of the Open Science Committee, established by TÜBİTAK in 2015, and of the ANKOS Artificial Intelligence Research Group.

Active in the international arena, Gürdal was involved in various phases of OpenAIRE, the European Union's open science infrastructure project, from 2011 to 2021. He was elected to the OpenAIRE Board of Directors in 2021, a position he currently holds. Gürdal is also a member of the DSpace Leadership Group and serves as the Turkish national node representative within the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). Furthermore, he is a partner in the EU projects PATTERN and DIRNA 'Development of Research Potential Through Institutional Academic Repository Network in Azerbaijan'. Gürdal holds active memberships in many professional organisations, including the Turkish Librarians' Association (TKD), the University and Research Librarians' Association (ÜNAK), the European Association for Research Information Systems (EuroCRIS), and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR).

Gürdal also possesses a strong entrepreneurial background; he is the founding partner of Research Ecosystems, an R&D company established within the IZTECH Technopark in 2021. With numerous publications in national and international journals, Gürdal closely monitors and implements scientific and technological developments in librarianship.