During almost 20 years of regular data acquisition, the Pierre Auger Observatory, the world's largest facility for measuring ultra-high energy cosmic rays, has collected a vast and diverse amount of data covering complementary research fields from astroparticle and fundamental physics to space weather science.
The Pierre Auger Collaboration has embraced the concept of open access to research data since its foundation. Since then, a gradual release process has been initiated, and a dedicated task force has been established to implement and sustain this effort over the long term. In line with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles, the mandate of the task force includes the selection of data samples and the documented translation of in-house analyses codes into popular and available software for easy exploration and manipulation of the data.
The Pierre Auger Open Data Portal was launched in February 2021 and contains 10% of the cosmic-ray data and 100% of the atmospheric and space-weather data. Since its initial release, the Portal has been extended and updated with new data samples. It also includes a detailed catalog of the showers created by the highest-energy particles and an outreach section aimed at engaging the general public in cosmic-ray science. The foreseen increase of the fraction of released cosmic-ray data to 30% and the inclusion of new detectors will further boost the scientific community's interest in the Observatory's data and their use for education and outreach initiatives.