To ensure that Indigenous peoples’ rights and knowledge are recognized in scientific data and scholarly publishing, a team of Indigenous scholars led by Lydia Jennings, an assistant professor of environmental studies, has established Guidelines for the Governance of Indigenous Peoples’ Data in Scholarly Publishing.
The guidelines (PDF) seek to implement the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance in the publishing realm. CARE is an acronym that stands for collective benefit, authority to control data, responsibility, and ethics.
Through the principles, the scholars hope that anyone working with Indigenous data will do so in a manner that is consistent with supporting Indigenous peoples’ rights, interests, self-determination, collective benefit, and well-being.
“When I was a PhD student and postdoc, I found that there was a lot of culturally important information available in public places, such as in environmental impact statements, reports, and publications, that are about Indigenous peoples without their full knowledge, consent, or access,” says Jennings, a citizen of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and Huichol.
As a soil scientist engaging with large soil databases and herbarium collections, Jennings found that the data she was working with might list that a sample is culturally significant to Native Americans, but not to which tribal nation the data pertains. And the information was only attributed to the researchers who collected the samples, not to the Indigenous peoples who shared and stewarded the information in the first place.
“The processes and expectations of how we as scholars communicate information back to the communities was pretty sparse,” says Jennings.
At the time, the American Geophysical Union was interested in establishing standards in this area, so AGU’s Shelley Stall contacted Jennings’ mentor, Stephanie Russo Carroll, an Ahtna woman and citizen of the Native Village of Kluti-Kaah and an associate professor of public health at the University of Arizona, about potential next steps. Given that Jennings had already been navigating conversations about the use and governance of Indigenous data, Carroll invited her to take the lead on the project.
Some of the issues that had come up were that journals need guidance for crediting Indigenous knowledge and a style guide for citing Indigenous communities that co-authors represent and work with.
Given that publishing such standards would have relevance across disciplines, including in environmental studies, anthropology, and health, Jennings and Carroll believed that it had to be a community effort.
They collaborated with Riley Taitingfong (CHamoru) at the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona, Jane Anderson at New York University, and Maui Hudson (Whakatōhea, Ngāruahine, and Te Māhurehure) at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, who joined the initiative as project leaders, working closely with partners at AGU and the National Information Standards Organization.
The leadership team coordinated with over 125 scholars, publishers, editors, and metadata experts from around the world.
“It’s been an honor to be part of this Indigenous-led collective effort to create first-of-its-kind guidelines for the scholarly publishing industry,” says Mia Ricci, director of publications operations at AGU.
From 2023 to 2025, Jennings and the team convened four workshops to develop best practices and guidelines for working ethically with Indigenous data throughout the research cycle, from design and implementation of a study to publication and post-production.
The CARE guidelines include updating peer review policies so that Indigenous community members and/or Indigenous organizations are properly attributed and included as reviewers.
The recommendations also propose featuring translated titles and abstracts in an Indigenous language alongside text in English, and publishing in both English and an Indigenous language, when feasible.
“In working with Indigenous authors from around the world, I’ve seen that so much can get lost in the English translation,” says Jennings, “so identifying opportunities to expand perspectives and share results in an Indigenous language can deepen reporting and extend reach.”
One of the challenges with publishing in peer-reviewed journals is access, as the process is expensive, and access to content often lies behind a paywall.
The CARE principles call for removing economic barriers for Indigenous authors by providing support for publishing fees and making content open access, so that anyone, including Indigenous groups, can access the literature.
“By establishing the CARE guidelines, we have outlined more ways for Indigenous communities to be engaged in the publishing process of research and to also be more digitally connected to the data,” says Jennings.
“We’ve created a framework for researchers and academic publishing to be more inclusive, where Indigenous knowledge and the contributions of Indigenous peoples and communities can be better recognized.”
The project was a collaborative effort by leadership from the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance, the Sovereign Soils Research Collaborative, the Indigenous Data Law Lab at New York University, and Te Kotahi Research Institute, with programmatic and organizational support from the American Geophysical Union’s Publications and Open Science Leadership teams and the National Information Standards Organization.