Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A DMP PDF emailed to the funder with the grant application and never revisited.
- Is an instance
An institutional DMP archived as a Word document with no further versions.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
An Active DMP under continual update.
- Not an instance
A Living DMP versioned through repository releases.
Editorial commentary
A static DMP is a Data Management Plan (DMP) produced at a single point in time — almost always at grant submission — and never subsequently updated, regardless of whether the project’s actual data practices diverge from what was originally written. It is the historical default: most narrative DMPs filed as a PDF or Word attachment to a grant application are, in this sense, static, because nothing in the submission process requires or prompts a later revision.
The practical cost of a static DMP shows up at two points a research office will recognise. During the project, a static plan provides no operational value — nobody consults it to decide where a new dataset should go, because it was written before that dataset existed. And at audit or reporting time, a static plan is weak evidence: a funder or reviewer checking compliance cannot tell from a static DMP whether its commitments were kept, only what was promised. This is the specific gap that the active DMP and living DMP concepts, and machine-actionable DMP (maDMP) tooling generally, were developed to close.
How it differs from adjacent DMP concepts
- vs. Active DMP — the direct opposite: an active DMP is deliberately kept current during project execution.
- vs. Living DMP — a living DMP goes further still, versioning and citing each significant revision.
- vs. DMP creation phase — every DMP, static or not, has a creation phase; “static” describes a plan that never moves past it.
References
- Simms, Jones, Mietchen & Miksa, “Ten principles for machine-actionable data management plans,” PLOS Computational Biology (2019).
Also known as
one-off DMP · snapshot DMP
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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