Data Preservation in High Energy Physics - why, how and when?

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance, methods, and timing of long-term data preservation in high energy physics to ensure future scientific analysis and heritage, highlighting technical approaches and practical case studies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of strategies and technical details for preserving high energy physics data, including a case study on reviving JADE data for advanced analysis.

Findings

Revival of JADE data enables new NNLO QCD measurements.

Long-term data preservation secures scientific heritage.

Organized efforts are essential for future data usability.

Abstract

Long-term preservation of data and software of large experiments and detectors in high energy physics is of utmost importance to secure the heritage of (mostly unique) data and to allow advanced physics (re-)analyses at later times. Summarising the work of an international study group, motivation, use cases and technical details are given for an organised effort to secure and enable future use of past, present and future experimental data. As a practical use case and motivation, the revival of JADE data and the corresponding latest results on measuring $\alpha_s$ in NNLO QCD are reviewed.