The LIGO Open Science Center

TL;DR

The LIGO Open Science Center provides broad access to LIGO gravitational wave data, including the full S5 dataset, along with tools and documentation to facilitate research and education worldwide.

Contribution

This paper details the first large-scale public release of LIGO data and the resources provided to support its use by researchers and educators.

Findings

First large-scale release of LIGO S5 data

Provides comprehensive tools and documentation

Facilitates global gravitational-wave research and education

Abstract

The LIGO Open Science Center (LOSC) fulfills LIGO's commitment to release, archive, and serve LIGO data in a broadly accessible way to the scientific community and to the public, and to provide the information and tools necessary to understand and use the data. In August 2014, the LOSC published the full dataset from Initial LIGO's "S5" run at design sensitivity, the first such large-scale release and a valuable testbed to explore the use of LIGO data by non-LIGO researchers and by the public, and to help teach gravitational-wave data analysis to students across the world. In addition to serving the S5 data, the LOSC web portal (losc.ligo.org) now offers documentation, data-location and data-quality queries, tutorials and example code, and more. We review the mission and plans of the LOSC, focusing on the S5 data release.