Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A JSON file with top-level 'dmp' object containing 'project', 'dataset', and 'contact' arrays validating against the published schema.
- Is an instance
A funder requiring DMP submissions to conform to RDA DMP CS v1.1.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
DataCite Metadata Schema (describes published datasets, not management plans).
- Not an instance
DCAT (a discovery catalogue vocabulary, not a planning standard).
Editorial commentary
The RDA DMP Common Standard is a community-developed application profile, maintained by the Research Data Alliance’s DMP Common Standards Working Group, that defines the core entities, properties, and JSON schema used to express a machine-actionable Data Management Plan (DMP). It models a plan as a graph of typed entities — dmp, project, contact, contributor, dataset, distribution, host, metadata, security_and_privacy, technical_resource, cost — each with required and optional properties, and it uses persistent identifiers wherever one is available (ORCID for people, ROR for organisations, DOI for datasets, re3data for repositories).
The standard’s significance for a research office is interoperability: because DMPRoadmap, Argos, DataDMP, and ezDMP all implement the same underlying schema, a plan authored in one platform can, in principle, be exported and read by another, and cross-tool comparisons of plan content become possible without bespoke translation. This is the schema referenced whenever a term on this site talks about a plan being “machine-actionable” or a machine-actionable DMP (maDMP).
How it differs from adjacent DMP concepts
- vs. maDMP — the Common Standard is the schema; a maDMP is any plan expressed in a schema like this one (in practice, almost always this one).
- vs. DMP component — a component is one instance of one of the standard’s entity types (e.g., one “host” or one “cost” entry) as it appears inside a real plan.
- vs. DMP RDA-JSON-LD — JSON-LD is a linked-data rendering of this same standard, not a competing schema.
References
- RDA DMP Common Standards Working Group outputs; GitHub repository RDA-DMP-Common-Standard/RDA-DMP-Common-Standard.
Also known as
RDA DMP CS · DMP Common Standard
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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vocab-term="RDA DMP Common Standard"
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},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:22:48",
"dateModified": "2026-09-05T14:23:41",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
