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This material is primarily based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (grant no. DGE-1321845). Addressing complex social-ecological issues requires all relevant sources of knowledge and data, especially those held by communities who remain close to the land. Centuries of oppression, extractive research practices, and misrepresentation have hindered balanced knowledge exchange with Indigenous communities and inhibited innovation and problem-solving capacity in all scientific fields. A recent shift in the research landscape reflects a growing interest in engaging across diverse communities and ways of knowing. Scientific discussions increasingly highlight the inherent value of Indigenous environmental ethics frameworks and processes as the original roadmaps for sustainable development planning, including their potential in addressing the climate crisis and related social and environmental concerns. Momentum in this shift is also propelled by an increasing body of research evidencing the role of Indigenous land stewardship for maintaining ecological health and biodiversity. However, a key challenge straining this movement lies rooted in colonial residue and ongoing actions that suppress and co-opt Indigenous knowledge systems. Scientists working with incomplete datasets privilege a handful of narratives, conceptual understandings, languages, and historical contexts, while failing to engage thousands of collective bodies of intergenerational, place-based knowledge systems. The current dominant colonial paradigm in scientific research risks continued harmful impacts to Indigenous communities that sustain diverse knowledge systems. Here, we outline how ethical standards in researcher practice can be raised in order to reconcile colonial legacies and ongoing settler colonial practices. We synthesize across Indigenous and community-based research protocols and frameworks, transferring knowledge across disciplines, and ground truthing methods and processes in our own practice, to present a relational science working model for supporting Indigenous rights and reconciliation in research. We maintain that core Indigenous values of integrity, respect, humility, and reciprocity should shape researcher responsibilities and methods applied in order to raise ethical standards and long-term relational accountability regarding Indigenous lands, rights, communities, and our shared futures. 

Datasets carry cultural and political context at all parts of the data life cycle. Historically, Earth science data repositories have taken their guidance and policies as a combination of mandates from their funding agencies and the needs of their user communities, typically universities, agencies, and researchers. Consequently, repository practices have rarely taken into consideration the needs of other communities such as the Indigenous Peoples on whose lands data are often acquired. In recent years, a number of global efforts have worked to improve the conduct of research as well as data policy and practices by the repositories that hold and disseminate it. One of these established the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Carroll et al. 2020), representing ‘Collective Benefit’, ‘Authority to Control’, ‘Responsibility’, and ‘Ethics”’ hosted by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA 2023a). In order to align to the CARE Principles, repositories may need to update their policies, architecture, service offerings, and their collaboration models. The question is how? Operationalizing principles into active repositories is generally a fraught process. This paper captures perspectives and recommendations from many of the repositories that are members of the Earth Science Information Partners (ESIPFed, n.d.) in conjunction with members of the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance (Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance n.d.) and GIDA, defines and prioritizes the set of activities Earth and Environmental repositories can take to better adhere to CARE Principles in the hopes that this will help implementation in repositories globally. 

The systemic challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic require cross-disciplinary collaboration in a global and timely fashion. Such collaboration needs open research practices and the sharing of research outputs, such as data and code, thereby facilitating research and research reproducibility and timely collaboration beyond borders. The Research Data Alliance COVID-19 Working Group recently published a set of recommendations and guidelines on data sharing and related best practices for COVID-19 research. These guidelines include recommendations for researchers, policymakers, funders, publishers and infrastructure providers from the perspective of different domains (Clinical Medicine, Omics, Epidemiology, Social Sciences, Community Participation, Indigenous Peoples, Research Software, Legal and Ethical Considerations). Several overarching themes have emerged from this document such as the need to balance the creation of data adherent to FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable), with the need for quick data release; the use of trustworthy research data repositories; the use of well-annotated data with meaningful metadata; and practices of documenting methods and software. The resulting document marks an unprecedented cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral, and cross-jurisdictional effort authored by over 160 experts from around the globe. This letter summarises key points of the Recommendations and Guidelines, highlights the relevant findings, shines a spotlight on the process, and suggests how these developments can be leveraged by the wider scientific community.