Improving Practices for Persistently Recording the CARE Principles for Collections of Place-based Research Samples, Observations and Instrument Measurements.

Indigenous Data Sovereignty is the right of Indigenous Peoples to govern the collection, ownership, and application of data about Indigenous communities, peoples, lands, and resources, including Earth and environmental samples and data collected for place-based research. Historically, any consent received from the local Indigenous communities to collect samples and data, including permissions for reuse, was at best recorded in administrative institutional files and rarely if ever stored in sample/survey/dataset metadata. Even if it was, there is little guarantee these properties would be connected to downstream subsamples or analytical outputs. As a result, it is hard to determine if the primary samples and data were collected and utilised ethically. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Carroll et al. 2020) provide a high-level framework for the governance and management of Indigenous data, whilst Local Contexts Notices and Labels provide a mechanism to record Indigenous interests. However, neither specify how and where these should be captured, nor how they can be carried downstream. The new Research Activity Identifier (RAiD, https://raid.org/), governed by ISO standard 23527:2022, provides a potential solution. RAiD is a persistent identifier and global registry for research projects. A RAiD links project components (contributors, organisations, inputs, outputs) described by other PIDs, plus other key project metadata. A RAiD can declare a Local Contexts Notice or Label, and potentially link to a document describing sampling/field data acquisition circumstances, including interactions with the local Indigenous communities. This RAiD can then be referenced by all downstream subsamples, datasets, and publications, ensuring consistency. If Indigenous consent changes, these changes are reflected in the RAiD record linked by derivative records (RAiDs are dynamic by design, and also provide a change history available). RAiD can also record any organisation who contributed to the funding and collection of samples and field data, thus enabling funders to track impact and ROI of their investments. This paper will show how RAiD can record CARE-enabling metadata and Local Contexts Notices and Labels for future sample collections and how it can be retrospectively added to legacy datasets.