A structured plan covering how research software will be developed, documented, licensed, tested, released, and maintained over a project's lifetime, increasingly required alongside or as an extension of a DMP.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A project SMP committing to semantic versioning, MIT licence, Zenodo deposit on each release, and Software Heritage archival.
Is an instance
A Horizon Europe project producing both a DMP and an SMP as deliverables.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A GitHub README file.
Not an instance
A general DMP that mentions one repository link.

Editorial commentary

SMPs address topics that DMPs do not naturally cover: software dependencies, build and test infrastructure, versioning and release schedules, software citation, deposit in archives such as Software Heritage, and post-project maintenance. The Software Sustainability Institute's SMP framework is widely cited.

References

Software Sustainability Institute, 'A Checklist for a Software Management Plan' (2018); Netherlands eScience Center SMP guidance.

Also known as

SMP · research software management plan

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Software management plan (SMP)"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-management-plan-smp" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-management-plan-smp",
  "name": "Software management plan (SMP)",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-management-plan-smp",
  "description": "A structured plan covering how research software will be developed, documented, licensed, tested, released, and maintained over a project's lifetime, increasingly required alongside or as an extension of a DMP.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/machine-actionable-dmps#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/software-management-plan-smp",
  "sameAs": [
    "SMP",
    "research software management plan"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-05-21T02:22:48",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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