Fig. 3. The fate of microbiome community data.

An assessment of the data location and state of the 635 studies in the V3–V4 subset. Data loss was divided into four categories: loss due to data location, errors in data deposition, errors in data formatting, and errors in data labeling. Data was categorized as ‘reusable’ if no faults in the above four categories were found. Data was categorized as ‘partially usable’ if faults in data formatting or data labeling were likely to create obstacles in data reuse (i.e., if data not findable in the database due to mislabeling). Finally, data was categorized as ‘not available’ if it was not publicly available on INSDC databases, or if the datasets were missing data which precluded their reusability.