FAR-DSI - Feasibility Assessment of Regulation of Digital Sequence Information (Final Report)

This report covers the activities and results of a feasibility study that was planned as part of the German preparations for the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), an international agreement adopted in December 2022 at the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15). Several options were discussed to introduce access and benefit sharing for the commercial use of digital sequence information on genetic resources (DSI). The scientific community was concerned about the largely open data corpus of genetic information collected in the International Nucleotide Sequence Data Collaboration (INSDC) and many other valuable open resources globally used in science. Thus the German Federation for Biological Data together with the DSMZ (host to the German Nagoya Protocol Hub) designed the project “Feasibility Assessment of Regulation of Digital Sequence Information (FAR-DSI)” to assess policy options identified in the UN negotiations against current practice of scientific databases and inform policy as well as science actors on the consequences of potential regulations. The project covered three years of negotiations and was supported by the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) with funds from the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMUKN).