Use Case: In-situ/on-the-fly manifests alongside 'payload' data about ro-crate HOT 2 OPEN

Agreed - but we might also want to make it possible to put the manifest OUTSIDE of the data tree altogether in some situations. The simplest approach is to go one level up, and for example put the data in a /data directory, but you might want to have manifests in sibling directories or elsewhere on the file system, eg a tool might store manifests in a an application directory until the data is ready to be packaged.

from ro-crate.

Just to reinforce this use case, here is the first Guiding Principle of the Psych-DS project:

First, Psych-DS is a technical specification designed for datasets that may be generated and handled by a single researcher. Tools that work with this specification may provide significant added functionality, but should not lose sight of the fact that Psych-DS’s audience is the individual researcher. For very large projects (in psychology and other disciplines), it’s often necessary and appropriate to consult with libraries and archiving organizations to prepare a dataset for archiving after the fact, but as researchers increasingly share their own datasets, they need to be able to manage the dataset preparation on their own, given appropriate software tools. One very helpful way to achieve this aim is to plan for sharing/archiving from the beginning of a project; Psych-DS is designed to be a format that can be used at any point in the research workflow.

from ro-crate.