Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A DMP with versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 each assigned a DMP ID and timestamped.
- Is an instance
A funder portal showing the DMP version in force at each project reporting period.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A Static DMP.
- Not an instance
A wiki page edited without version history.
Editorial commentary
A living DMP is a Data Management Plan (DMP) that is versioned and citable, with each significant change over the life of the project captured as a distinct, identifiable version rather than a silent edit. In tooling terms this typically means each version of the plan is assigned its own persistent identifier — a “DMP ID” that resolves to the current version but also preserves earlier ones — so a reviewer can ask “which version of the plan was in force when this consent form was signed?” and get a definitive answer.
That traceability is the feature that separates a living DMP from an active DMP that is simply kept up to date: an active DMP can be edited freely, while a living DMP’s edit history is itself part of the project record, supporting both audit (“show the plan as it stood at each reporting milestone”) and longitudinal analysis (“did the sharing commitment change after the ethics amendment, and if so, when”). A research office is most likely to encounter this in a machine-actionable DMP (maDMP) platform that supports versioning natively (DMPRoadmap-family tools increasingly expose a persistent DMP ID for this purpose) rather than as something built manually.
How it differs from adjacent DMP concepts
- vs. Active DMP — living DMPs are a stricter, versioned subset of the broader “actively maintained” idea.
- vs. Static DMP — the clearest contrast on the site: one document, never revisited, versus a citable sequence of documents.
- vs. DMP lifecycle — the lifecycle describes the phases a plan passes through; “living” describes how faithfully those transitions are recorded.
References
- Burnette, Mannheimer et al., “A vision for living, citable DMPs,” Data Science Journal (2022).
Also known as
versioned DMP · evolving DMP
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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