Who Really Wins from the New Microbiome Data Policy

The new roadmap for equitable reuse of microbiome data asks us to believe that fairness can be achieved with a metadata tag (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-025-02116-2). The tag is called the DRI and it links a dataset to ORCID accounts. The idea is that users must contact the data creator before reuse. It is presented as a solution for equity. In reality it is a policy designed to protect the most powerful laboratories and to make life harder for those who most depend on open access.

The six person Data Reuse Core Team is entirely based in Canada, the United States, and Germany. That means one hundred percent of the leadership comes from high income countries with advanced sequencing capacity. There is no representation from Africa, South America, South Asia, or Indigenous communities. This is the intellectual group that defined the strategy from the start.

The larger Data Reuse Consortium includes more than two hundred scientists. On the surface this looks global. The numbers tell a different story. About 60% of contributors are based in Europe. About 30%t are based in the United States and Canada. Asia contributes fewer than 10%. South America contributes fewer than 5%. Africa contributes fewer than 3%. Oceania contributes fewer than 4%. Together this means more than 80% of contributors come from Europe and North America while the Global South is barely represented even though it holds most of the world’s microbial diversity.

Institutional power is also lopsided. At least a quarter of contributors are tied to major sequencing centers or repositories. These include the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in the United States, EMBL EBI in the United Kingdom, NCBI in the United States, and German research consortia such as Helmholtz, Max Planck, and Leibniz. These institutions already control the global pipelines for microbiome data. By contrast only a handful of contributors are from minority serving universities or smaller regional institutions. The few from Nigeria, Kenya, Brazil, and Chile stand alone with no structural weight behind them.

The DRI tag will strengthen this imbalance. It gives large laboratories a formal mechanism to control how their data are reused. Smaller labs and minority scientists who rely on public data will now face new administrative steps and the risk of conflict. The cost is trivial for elite labs with staff and infrastructure. For underfunded investigators or investigators from regional or smaller institutions it is just another barrier. This is not equity. It is consolidation of power under the name of fairness.

The policy also ignores the most obvious inequity. Public microbiome repositories are dominated by data from Western populations. Minority and Indigenous microbiomes are almost absent. The DRI does not address this at all. In fact it may restrict the few minority datasets that do exist by placing them behind additional gates. What is called protection for data creators is in practice another layer of exclusion.

The roadmap sidesteps structural incentives. Academic promotion still rewards first author papers rather than data curation. Funding agencies still pour resources into sequencing machines rather than equitable collaborations. Indigenous data governance frameworks such as the CARE principles are mentioned but not required. Dataset DOIs are still inconsistently used. These are the kinds of changes that would matter. Instead we are given another tag in a database.

The outcome is a two tier system. Large labs in Europe and North America get more control. Smaller labs and minority scientists hesitate to reuse data because they cannot risk a dispute. Those who could gain most from open access are blocked. Those with the most resources gain new protections.

Equity is not a handshake agreement between powerful labs in the Global North. Equity means creating structures that give access and recognition to those without resources or institutional power. That means enforcing data citation as rigorously as paper citation. That means financial rewards for making data open. That means making Indigenous governance principles binding.

The DRI tag may improve communication but it does not correct inequity. It serves the interests of the already established. It allows exclusion to be repackaged as fairness. Unless structural change follows this is not a solution. It is window dressing on hierarchy.