Open Science (OS) – an emerging global trend driven by advances in digital technologies and government’s commitment to greater transparency and value for money of publicly funded research – is at its early stages, even in countries with high R&D expenditures, such as South Korea. This study provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of Korea’s national OS approach, with a focus on exploring the current OS regulatory and technological environments it operates under, and uncovering its SWOT – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It concludes that internal weaknesses, such as insufficient political will to promote OS, dominate other SWOT characteristics of Korea’s national OS approach. Thus, the highest priority should be given to strategies attempting to minimise both internal weaknesses and external threats, such as reinforcing domestic Open Access publishing ecosystem to mitigate Korean researchers’ dependency on large international commercial publishers.

This paper contributes to “Open Science” theory, with a specific focus on Open Science data generated by scholars. To this end, a mixed- method systematic literature review, including science mapping techniques, was conducted. Our preliminary results reveal the potential of Open Science as a domain for interdisciplinary research. A keyword co-occurrence network analysis using the VOSviewer visualisation tool identified five clusters of interrelated sub-concepts within Open Science research. The key distinctive characteristics and the various categories of Open Science data have been identified. The relevant data platforms have been provided to exemplify each category of Open Science data. Finally, a distinction between Open Science data and Open Government data was explored and the convergence point between them was presented.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has become a major milestone encouraging a change from traditional scholarly communication practices and policies in favour of greater openness, sharing, and reuse. Interviews with South Korean and Australian experts has helped to highlight the factors that either enable or limit the impact of Open Science during a public health emergency, such as the COVID-19 outbreak. The paper categorised such factors as: contextual and external; institutional and regulatory; resource-based; individual and motivational, and supplemented this categorisation with the interviewees' quotes to illustrate specific cases and examples. The institutional and regulatory factors are perceived as the most important ones by interviewees.

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