DESCRIPTION

The CARE principles are a set of values developed by the International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group, under the aegis of the Research Data Alliance and in consultation with a wider group of Indigenous Peoples, organisations and stakeholders (Carroll et al., 2020). The principles can be viewed as part of movements towards Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Indigenous People's rights to assert control over their data. They also seek to balance the technical and functional approach to data management and sharing of the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) with a consideration of data's 'people and purpose dimensions' (Taitingfong et al., 2024, 82). As an acronym, CARE consists of the following components: Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics. Each of these has subcomponents; the subcomponents of Responsibility, for example, are 'For expanding capability and capacity', 'For positive relationships', and 'For Indigenous languages and worldviews' (Carroll, 2020, Fig. 2).

The CARE principles are relevant to any field which involves Indigenous data, such as anthropology and ethnography, human geography, environmental sciences and archaeology. Using the latter as a brief example can illustrate some of the issues they seek to address. Gupta et al. consider archaeology as 'extractive, a practice that has historically benefited dominant groups' (2023, 76), while Di Donato and Prevost have highlighted that archaeology's failure to attend to questions of ownership of, and Indigenous access to, data has 'resulted in indigenous and descendant communities not having access to or ownership and possession of their material heritage' (2025, 29). The CARE principles address these power imbalances by emphasising the need for ethical, inclusive approaches to the collection, management and use of Indigenous data - approaches that benefit communities themselves in terms of inclusive development and control over cultural heritage.

Aside from indicating that data management should be led by tribal expectations and preferences (Carroll et al., 2022), the principles' documentation does not itself specify the practices through which they may be enacted, though at the time of writing (2025), work is currently underway on a CARE data maturity model that will incorporate a more precise set of criteria and indicators for their implementation. Nevertheless, scholars such as Jennings et al. (2023) have detailed some of the specific ways researchers can align with CARE. These include using data management plans to 'ensure the authority to control by identifying the current and long-term stewardship of Indigenous data, protocols, governance and knowledge' (Jennings et al., 2023, n.p.), using the language and categorisations of Indigenous Peoples when collecting and coding data, and communicating data in culturally accessible formats. Garba et al. (2023) emphasise the importance of co-designing with communities the process by which their data will be managed, stored, and/or shared, while Gupta et al. highlight the need to attach culturally relevant metadata and provenance information 'to inform on authority, consent, and conditions of use of Indigenous data throughout the data life cycle' (2023, 80). Such metadata might take the form of Traditional Knowledge (TK) labels, digital tags which provide important context on data provenance and on how the data should and should not be used (Gupta et al., 2023, 85). For example, accompanying a recording of traditional songs, TK labels might indicate that these are being shared for outreach purposes but should only be sung by members of the community. O'Brien et al. (2024) further detail a series of actions that should be taken by research repositories in relation to data concerning Indigenous communities.

The kind of 'openness' at play here is not necessarily the 'openness' of open data, just with some modifications; in fact, adherence to the CARE principles may at times prevent any onward open sharing of the data, where this contravenes Indigenous rights and data governance stipulations (Ng, 2025, 3). As Carroll comments, 'Some tribal laws and policies dictate that all data generated from a research study is property of the tribe and all data must be returned to the tribe at the conclusion of the study' (2022, 3). The openness of applications of the CARE principles therefore might be an openness of outputs (where openness is understood in a public and unrestricted sense), but this is not necessarily the case. Rather, the kind of openness that can be emphasised here is the openness to and valuing of individuals and groups outside academia, whose preferences regarding the handling of their data are heard and acted upon, and with whom culturally cohesive and beneficial outputs are shared. It is also the openness to and valuing of broader conceptions of knowledge - traditional, inherited, experiential - than are typical within the extractive and instrumental research logics the principles seek to address.

We close this entry with a comment on the scope of the principles' application. It should be noted that while the original formulation of the CARE principles refers only to Indigenous data, various scholars have called for their extension to broader contexts that entail data relating to marginalised or vulnerable populations (see, for example, Suchikova & Nazarovets, 2025; Schulder, 2022); Schulder's discussion of applying the CARE principles to a project entailing data relating to Deaf communities in Germany is of particular interest in this respect.

References

Carroll, S.R. et al. (2020). 'The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance', Data Science Journal, 19(1). https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-043

Carroll, S.R. et al. (2022). 'Using Indigenous Standards to Implement the CARE Principles: Setting Expectations through Tribal Research Codes', Frontiers in Genetics, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2022.823309

Di Donato, F. and Provost, L. (2025). 'Why Isn't FAIR Enough? Bringing Together Methods and Values for Open Science Uptake', Umanistica Digitale, 19, 17–46. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/20976

Garba, I. et al. (2023). 'Indigenous Peoples and Research: Self-Determination in Research Governance', Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2023.1272318

Gupta, N. et al. (2023). 'The CARE Principles and the Reuse, Sharing, and Curation of Indigenous Data in Canadian Archaeology', Advances in Archaeological Practice: A Journal of the Society of American Archaeology, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2022.33

Jennings, L. et al. (2023). 'Applying the "CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance" to Ecology and Biodiversity Research', Nature Ecology & Evolution, 7(10), 1547–1551. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02161-2

Ng, J.Y. (2025). 'The Case for Data Sharing in Traditional, Complementary, and Integrative Medicine Research', Integrative Medicine Research, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.imr.2024.101101

O'Brien, M. et al. (2024). 'Earth Science Data Repositories: Implementing the CARE Principles', Data Science Journal, 23. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2024-037

Schulder, M. (2022). 'How to be FAIR when you CARE: The DGS Corpus as a Case Study of Open Science Resources for Minority Languages', in 2022 Language Resources and Evaluation Conference Lrec 2022, pp. 164–173. https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.18.pdf [accessed 01/12/25]

Suchikova, Y. and Nazarovets, S. (2025). 'Extending the CARE Principles: Managing Data for Vulnerable Communities in Wartime and Humanitarian Crises', Scientific Data, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04756-9

Taitingfong, R. et al. (2024). 'Aligning Policy and Practice to Implement CARE with FAIR through Indigenous Peoples' Protocols', Acta Borealia, 41(2), 80–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/08003831.2024.2410112