Open Science at a time of the COVID-19 pandemic: a new opportunity to improve emergency response

Abstract

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.