According to a press release from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, data from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made openly available.
The first high-level and analysable collision data openly released come from the CMS experiment and were originally collected in 2010 during the first LHC run. This data set is now publicly available on the CERN Open Data Portal. Open source software to read and analyse the data is also available, together with the corresponding documentation. The CMS collaboration is committed to releasing its data three years after collection, after they have been thoroughly studied by the collaboration.
The Open Data Portal itself includes a wealth of information including tools, documentation on the formats and primary and processed data sets. CERN also provide a (virtualbox)Virtual Machine with the processing tools included ready to go.
Also covered at HackerNews, and an earlier discussion.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @04:02AM
I have not done analysis work myself, being on the experimental side, but after watching high-strung physicists tearing each other a new one at analysis seminars, perhaps it will be good to democratize. This is a nice gesture, but ultimately I will be very surprised if anyone from the public manages to find something new and notable in the data. In the short term it'll probably serve more as a streamlined way to introduce grad students to analysis.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 25 2014, @07:38AM
Maybe I could use it! I want to establish a correlation between gravity and how much things weigh. Oh, and how much things cost. And how long it takes for the Cable Guy to show up to fix Cable. I may be on to a non-rational cosmological constant! Or nothing.