Status Report of the DPHEP Study Group: Towards a Global Effort for Sustainable Data Preservation in High Energy Physics
hep-ex
/ Authors
Z. Akopov, Silvia Amerio, David Asner, Eduard Avetisyan, Olof Barring, James Beacham, Matthew Bellis, Gregorio Bernardi, Siegfried Bethke, Amber Boehnlein
and 80 more authors
Travis Brooks, Thomas Browder, Rene Brun, Concetta Cartaro, Marco Cattaneo, Gang Chen, David Corney, Kyle Cranmer, Ray Culbertson, Sunje Dallmeier-Tiessen, Dmitri Denisov, Cristinel Diaconu, Vitaliy Dodonov, Tony Doyle, Gregory Dubois-Felsmann, Michael Ernst, Martin Gasthuber, Achim Geiser, Fabiola Gianotti, Paolo Giubellino, Andrey Golutvin, John Gordon, Volker Guelzow
/ 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.