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

Siegfried Bethke

Published 2010-09-20Version 1

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.