LHC plans for open data future : Nature News & Comment

"When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is humming along, the data come in a deluge. The four experimental detectors at the facility, based at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, collect some 25 petabytes of information each year.  Storing the data is not a problem: hard drives are cheap and getting cheaper. The challenge is preserving knowledge that is less commonly stored — the software, algorithms and reference plots specific to each experiment. These often degrade or disappear with time, says Cristinel Diaconu of the Marseilles Centre for Particle Physics in France, who is chair of the international Data Preservation in Long Term Analysis in High Energy Physics (DPHEP) study group. He worries that if the data continue to be stored in their current state, physicists trying to decipher them in 10 years’ time will be unable to reconstruct the discovery of the Higgs boson. 'When the LHC programme comes to an end, it will probably be the last data at this frontier for many years,' he says. 'We can’t afford to lose it.'  The DPHEP is therefore trying to push data-preservation efforts from mere storage to a system of open sharing. The thinking goes that data and the knowledge needed to interpret them are more likely to survive in the long term if many people outside an experiment are constantly trying to make sense of them ..."