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

Z. Akopov, Silvia Amerio, David Asner, Eduard Avetisyan, Olof Barring, James Beacham, Matthew Bellis, Gregorio Bernardi, Siegfried Bethke, Amber Boehnlein, 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, Takanori Hara, Hisaki Hayashii, Andreas Heiss, Frederic Hemmer, Fabio Hernandez, Graham Heyes, Andre Holzner, Peter Igo-Kemenes, Toru Iijima, Joe Incandela, Roger Jones, Yves Kemp, Kerstin Kleese van Dam, Juergen Knobloch, David Kreincik, Kati Lassila-Perini, Francois Le Diberder, Sergey Levonian, Aharon Levy, Qizhong Li, Bogdan Lobodzinski, Marcello Maggi, Janusz Malka, Salvatore Mele, Richard Mount, Homer Neal, Jan Olsson, Dmitri Ozerov, Leo Piilonen, Giovanni Punzi, Kevin Regimbal, Daniel Riley, Michael Roney, Robert Roser, Thomas Ruf, Yoshihide Sakai, Takashi Sasaki, Gunar Schnell, Matthias Schroeder, Yves Schutz, Jamie Shiers, Tim Smith, Rick Snider, David M. South, Rick St. Denis, Michael Steder, Jos Van Wezel, Erich Varnes, Margaret Votava, Yifang Wang, Dennis Weygand, Vicky White, Katarzyna Wichmann, Stephen Wolbers, Masanori Yamauchi, Itay Yavin, Hans von der Schmitt

Published 2012-05-21Version 1

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.