Open data provenance and reproducibility: a case study from publishing CMS open data

In this paper we present the latest CMS open data release published on the CERN Open Data portal. The samples of raw datasets, collision and simulated datasets were released together with the detailed information about the data provenance. The data production chain covers the necessary compute environments, the configuration files and the computational procedures used in each data production step. We describe data curation techniques used to obtain and publish the data provenance information and we study the possibility to reproduce parts of the released data using the publicly available information. The present work demonstrates the usefulness of releasing selected samples of raw and primary data in order to fully ensure the completeness of information about data production chain for the attention of general data scientists and other non-specialists interested in using particle physics data for education or research purposes.