CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance Are Reshaping Publication Policies

By the time an Indigenous dataset reaches a journal's supplementary files, it has passed through a community research office, a university ethics board, a data manager, and at least one reviewer. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance exist for that entire chain, not just the last editor who checks the files. Published by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance in 2020, the principles give journals a concrete way to ask who governed the data before it became a downloadable object.

Four words carry the framework: Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics. They were written to sit alongside the FAIR principles — findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable — without replacing them. FAIR describes what a dataset should be. CARE describes who should decide what happens to it, and under what conditions.

Why CARE Exists

Data governance rules in research publishing spent most of the 2010s optimising for openness. The FAIR movement, formalised in 2016, pushed repositories, identifiers, and machine-readable metadata. What it did not address was a basic imbalance: open data can be open for everyone except the people it describes. Indigenous communities often had less access to data about their own lands, languages, health, and histories than outside researchers did.

Indigenous data sovereignty asserts that Indigenous peoples have the right to govern the collection, ownership, and application of data about their communities and territories. The CARE Principles translated that claim into four practical duties for researchers and publishers.

Four Principles, Four Editorial Checks

The principles are useful only if an editor can apply them to a manuscript rather than admire them from a distance. Each one maps to a document an author can produce without building a new governance system.

• Collective Benefit: Data ecosystems should be designed so Indigenous peoples receive benefit from the data's use. In an editorial workflow, this appears in the difference between a data availability statement that says 'available on request' and one that explains how results return to the community.
• Authority to Control: Indigenous governing bodies and individuals hold the right to set protocols for data access and use. For a journal, a consent form from an ethics board is not enough on its own; there has to be evidence that community institutions agreed to the specific reuse.
• Responsibility: Researchers and publishers are accountable for how data support Indigenous self-determination. This can mean naming the community, providing plain-language summaries, and building local capacity rather than extracting data.
• Ethics: The data life cycle must minimise harm, maximise justice, and account for future use. Editors check this by asking whether future users will understand restrictions and whether re-identification risks have been addressed.

Those four documents — a benefit-sharing statement, a governance authority record, a plain-language summary, and a future-use restriction note — fit into the same supplementary material workflows journals already run.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

What Has Actually Changed in Publishing

Change is uneven. The paper that codified CARE in the Data Science Journal in 2020 is now a routine citation in data policy discussions, and the Research Data Alliance International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group continues to work on metadata and best practice. But journal-level requirements remain less standardised than funder mandates for data management plans.

Editorial teams that already enforce data citation and repository deposit are finding that CARE requires a different kind of metadata. A dataset can be FAIR and still fail CARE if repositories do not record community-level authority. Funding-side data sharing rules that tighten open access, such as NIH and EU enforcement, do not always distinguish Indigenous governance from general privacy. That gap is exactly what CARE is meant to close.

OCAP, Te Mana Raraunga, and the Building Blocks

CARE did not appear in a vacuum. In Canada, the First Nations Information Governance Centre established OCAP — ownership, control, access, and possession — as a standard for First Nations data long before FAIR. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Te Mana Raraunga has pushed for Māori data sovereignty and for data to be understood as a taonga, or treasured possession. In Australia, Maiam nayri Wingara represents Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander data sovereignty networks. These movements shaped CARE and still produce the governance models journals can point to.

That context matters because an editor who sees CARE for the first time in a cover letter might treat it as an administrative checkbox. It has a legal and relational history that predates the 2020 paper.

What This Means for Your Lab

Most researchers will not build a new governance system. They will hit this issue at four points: before data collection, at manuscript submission, when a repository asks for unrestricted deposit, and if a community objects after release. The practical work is small — a consent form clause that includes secondary use and community governance, a data management plan that names the community authority, a one-page summary written in plain language that accompanies the dataset, and a short note to the community before submission.

A colleague I worked with in a health informatics group — call her Dr. N — kept a template called 'governance before repository' on the lab drive. For every dataset touching Indigenous communities, the template required the name of the approving body, the date of approval, and a direct answer to the question 'who can say no to reuse?' It added perhaps twenty minutes to submission. It also prevented two withdrawals.

The base rate is less forgiving. Researchers who collect data without a governance record often discover during publication that the editor will not accept a data availability statement that says 'data not available due to ethics.' That phrase works less often now because reviewers have started asking what authority was consulted, not just whether an ethics board signed off.

Photo by Sharad Bhat on Unsplash

The Hard Parts Editors Still Avoid

Two structural problems get most of the attention. Metadata schemas for data repositories do not yet have widely adopted fields for Indigenous governance authority, so a governance decision has no stable place to live in the record. Editorial training in research integrity also rarely covers collective rights; most training frames data ethics as individual consent and anonymisation. That second gap is stubborn because even a well-intentioned editor may not know what to ask. Power asymmetries add another layer: a community may hold governance authority but lack the institutional infrastructure to enforce it when a publisher wants data in a global repository.

These are not reasons to avoid CARE. They are reasons to move from acknowledgement to requirement, with concrete fields and templates rather than another statement of support.

A Concrete Next Step

Download the CARE principles one-pager from GIDA and put it beside your institution's FAIR checklist. For your next dataset involving an Indigenous community, write the governance statement before you draft the cover letter. If the journal's data policy has no place for governance conditions, send that absence to the data editor. That note, repeated across enough submissions, is how policy changes.