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If you've ever dreamed of becoming a particle physicist, now's your chance.

Cern has launched its Open Data Portal, which lets members of the public pore through collision data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

It is the first time data has been made openly available for research and educational purposes.

Cern in Geneva has begun releasing collision data from the LHC on their Open Data Portal website (screenshot shown). The public are invited to use the information for research and education. Data will come from various experiments at the particle accelerator

To date, all publications from the LHC have been published Open Access, free to read and re-use.

But this latest development is the result of LHC teams approving Open Data policies to release collision data to the public.

'Launching the Cern Open Data Portal is an important step for our Organization,' said Cern Director-General Dr Rolf Heuer in a statement.

'Data from the LHC programme are among the most precious assets of the LHC experiments, that today we start sharing openly with the world.

'We hope these open data will support and inspire the global research community, including students and citizen scientists.'

The first data to be released on the Open Data Portal will be from the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, first recorded back in 2010.

To view the data, users will need to run Linux, and will also need to install open source software provided by Cern on their computer.

The CMS team will release data three years after it has been collected, to give those on the team time to analyse the data before others get their hands on it.

The first data to be released on the Open Data Portal will be from the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, pictured here. The CMS team will release data three years after it has been collected, to give those on the team time to analyse the data before others get their hands on it

'This is all new and we are curious to see how the data will be re-used,' said CMS data preservation coordinator Dr Kati Lassila-Perini.

'We've prepared tools and examples of different levels of complexity from simplified analysis to ready-to-use online applications.

'We hope these examples will stimulate the creativity of external users.'

Cern will also release data from the Alice, Atlas and LHCb collaborations on the website to be viewed by anyone for research or educational purposes.