How data governance principles influence participation in biodiversity science

ABSTRACT

Biodiversity science is in a pivotal period when diverse groups of actors – including researchers, businesses, national governments, and Indigenous Peoples – are negotiating wide-ranging norms for governing and managing biodiversity data in digital repositories. The management of these repositories, often called biodiversity data portals, can serve either to redress or to perpetuate the colonial history of biodiversity science and current inequities. Both researchers and Indigenous Peoples are implementing new strategies to influence whom biodiversity data portals recognise as salient participants in data management and use. Two notable efforts are the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and CARE (Collective benefit, Authority, Responsibility, Ethics) Data Principles. Actors use these principles to influence the governance of biodiversity data portals. ‘Fit-for-use’ data is a social status provided by groups of actors who approve whether the data meets specific purposes. Advocates for the FAIR and CARE Principles use them in a similar way to institutionalise the authority of different groups of actors. However, the FAIR Principles prioritise the ability of machine agents to understand the meanings of data, while the CARE Principles prioritise Indigenous Peoples and their data sovereignty. Together, FAIR and CARE illustrate a broader emerging strategy for institutionalising international norms for digital repositories about who they should recognise as having a formal role in determinations of the fitness-for-use of data.

KEYWORDS:

• FAIR Principles
• CARE Principles
• Indigenous data
• data sovereignty
• citizen science
• knowledge infrastructure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We follow the understanding of Indigenous peoples suggested by the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues: ‘Indigenous peoples can be understood as peoples with Historical continuity with pre – colonial or pre-settler societies; strong links to territories and surrounding natural resources; distinct social, economic or political systems; form non-dominant groups of society; resolved to maintain and reproduce their ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities’ (United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, n.d.).

2 The more recent TRUST Principles are also relevant but outside our scope here (Lin et al., 2020).

3 We follow (Thompson et al., 2020, p. 1) in distinguishing between local and Indigenous knowledge “based on the histories, socio-political contexts, and self-identification of those creating and holding the knowledge” in reference to the definition of Indigenous peoples given above.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by United States National Science Foundation: [grant no SES 2122818].

Notes on contributors

Beckett Sterner

Beckett Sterner is an Assistant Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. His research investigates what knowledge is needed for people to work together while differing in fundamental ways, including in beliefs, aims, and values. He examines this driving question using knowledge infrastructures for global biodiversity loss as a case study, including data commons, modelling methods, and international governance. He has an interdisciplinary background in history, philosophy, and social studies of science as well as statistics and biology.

Steve Elliott

Steve Elliott is a Research Affiliate at Arizona State University’s Centre for Biology and Society, for which he studies the economics, social organisation, and reasoning strategies of research. Some of his recent work examines science diaspora networks and proof-of-concept research.