Status Report of the DPHEP Study Group: Towards a Global Effort for Sustainable Data Preservation in High Energy Physics

TL;DR

This paper reviews the efforts and challenges in preserving high-energy physics data, proposing an international organization to coordinate sustainable data management for long-term scientific analysis.

Contribution

It extends previous reports by analyzing the research case and detailing international projects, proposing a global organization for HEP data preservation.

Findings

Analysis of the research importance of data preservation

Description of international HEP data projects

Proposal for an international data management organization

Abstract

Data from high-energy physics (HEP) experiments are collected with significant financial and human effort and are mostly unique. An inter-experimental study group on HEP data preservation and long-term analysis was convened as a panel of the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA). The group was formed by large collider-based experiments and investigated the technical and organisational aspects of HEP data preservation. An intermediate report was released in November 2009 addressing the general issues of data preservation in HEP. This paper includes and extends the intermediate report. It provides an analysis of the research case for data preservation and a detailed description of the various projects at experiment, laboratory and international levels. In addition, the paper provides a concrete proposal for an international organisation in charge of the data management and policies in high-energy physics.