Biocultural Labels and Notices
The use of Biocultural (BC) Labels and Notices supports transparency and integrity in research engagements with Indigenous communities (e.g. tribes, clans; Anderson & Hudson, 2020). The initiative is part of the Local Contexts system (www.localcontexts.org, Anderson & Christen, 2019) that has successfully instilled information regarding the Indigenous provenance, context, and appropriate use of collections into digital infrastructures, through the use of Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels and Notices (Anderson, 2012). In response to the Nagoya Protocol and concerns over Indigenous (genomic) Data Sovereignty (Carroll et al., 2020; Hudson et al., 2020), the BC Labels/Notices extend the inclusion of Indigenous interests to biological research (Anderson & Hudson, 2020). The Labels and Notices (Figure 1) are designed to provide a highly visible (and in time, quickly recognizable), machine-readable, persistent and durable connection between collaborating Indigenous communities and: researchers, research projects and activity; the collected genetic resources, generated Digital Sequence Information (DSI), and knowledge; that exist as metadata in sample/data repositories and can appear on published articles.
The BC Labels support Nagoya Protocol expectations around the disclosure and origins of genetic resources (i.e. Provenance Label) and help to define and communicate Indigenous community expectations and consent about appropriate and future use of genetic resources and derived benefits. Importantly, BC Labels may only be applied by an Indigenous community and although the icons are generic in appearance, each Label has a persistent unique identifier and the Label metadata (as text) is customized to each use-case (potentially a research project, curated collection, a specimen, or collaboration). These community customized Labels are hosted on the Local Contexts Hub (https://localcontexts.org/tk-label-hub) and offer an Indigenous narrative regarding ABS that is not pre- or over-determined by researchers.