CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has launched its Open Data Portal where data from real collision events, produced by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will for the first time be made openly available to all. It is expected that these data will be of high value for the research community, and also be used for education purposes.
The principle of openness is enshrined in CERN's founding Convention, and all LHC publications have been published Open Access, free for all to read and re-use. Widening the scope, the LHC collaborations recently approved Open Data policies and will release collision data over the coming years.
The first high-level and analysable collision data openly released come from the CMS experiment and were originally collected in 2010 during the first LHC run. This data set is now publicly available on the CERN Open Data Portal. Open source software to read and analyse the data is also available, together with the corresponding documentation. The CMS collaboration is committed to releasing its data three years after collection, after they have been thoroughly studied by the collaboration.
In parallel, the CERN Open Data Portal gives access to additional event data sets from the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb collaborations, which have been specifically prepared for educational purposes, such as the international masterclasses in particle physics benefiting over ten thousand high-school students every year. These resources are accompanied by visualisation tools.
All data on OpenData.cern.ch are shared under a Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication; data and software are assigned unique DOI identifiers to make them citable in scientific articles; and software is released under open source licenses. The CERN Open Data Portal is built on the open-source Invenio Digital Library software, which powers other CERN Open Science tools and initiatives.
