Data management plans and infrastructure are structurally disconnected

The compliance gap between what institutions promise funders and what they deliver is structural rather than behavioral. A researcher writes a data management plan because the funder requires one. The plan describes depositing data in a repository, maintaining metadata, and providing access. The researcher receives the grant, spends three to five years generating data, and stores it on a laboratory server or a personal drive in whatever format is convenient at the time. When the grant ends, the plan sits in a filing cabinet and the data sits on a hard drive. Neither is connected to the other.

The plan was a compliance artifact, and the institution provided no infrastructure to make it anything else. This is a Tier 0 problem dressed in Tier 1 language: the plan promises Tier 1 behavior, while the infrastructure supporting most researchers remains Tier 0.

The 8/2 declared-vs-delivered compliance gap (E-0048) measures the consequence of this structural disconnect across 2.1 million articles. The gap is not closing through better plan-writing; it can only close by infrastructure that produces compliance as a byproduct of operation rather than as a manual procedural follow-through.

C-0033 is the operational counterpart to C-0007. C-0007 says verification is the architectural property the regime is converging on; C-0033 says the current state is its absence — plans without infrastructure to back them. The two together describe the gap R3 (integrate compliance evidence generation into the deposit workflow) closes operationally.