Preliminary Recommendations Guidelines for the Governance of Indigenous Data in Scholarly Publishing

Citation: Jennings, L.L., Jones, K., Lazrus, H., Maldonado, J., Martinez, A., Taitingfong, R., Tofighi-Niaki, A., Thomas, B., Dye, D., David-Chavez, D., Weber, J., Spellman, K., Johnson, N., Alegado, R.A., Duerr, R., Ketchum, S., Russo Carroll, S. 2025. Governance of Indigenous data in open earth systems science. Nature Communications. 16, 572. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-53480-2

Increasingly, the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance are being applied and operationalized into various phases of the data ecosystem. However, there have been inconsistent practices across the data lifecycle and by data actors. We are convening scholars, publishers, editors, and metadata experts to develop publishing guidelines to better operationalize Indigenous Data Sovereignty and the CARE Principles across the data and research lifecycle.

This effort is led by leadership from the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance, ENRICH, and Te Kotahi Research Institute, with programmatic and organization support from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Publications and Open Science Leadership teams and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

Guidelines: Section Preview

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CARE in Publishing Timeline

Planning Session (November 2023) 20-30 selected participants
Discuss needs and challenges to draft outline of publishing guidelines
Workshop (March 2024) 30-50 participants
Expand participants
Draft publishing guidelines using feedback from previous session
Summit Workshops (May 2025) 55 participants
Share publishing guidelines with broader scientific publishing community and Indigenous scholars for review and feedback;
Implementation Workshop (July 2025) 60 participants
Further review of and secure endorsements to implement guidelines
Preliminary Recommendations Release (December 15, 2025)
Guidelines Release (Early 2026)

Publishing Workflow

The figure below describes the stages of the scholarly publishing workflow, including author, staff, editor, and reviewer actions. The draft guidelines are structured so that they flow from pre-submission to final publication.

Image credit: Kristina Vrouwenvelder, AGU, 2024

Section 2.1 of these recommendations deals with pre-submission considerations for Indigenous data sovereignty, which is step 1 in this diagram,
Section 2.2 aligns with step 2 in the diagram,
Section 2.3 deals with broad publisher policies,
Section 2.4 aligns with steps 3-5 in the diagram,