  The LIGO Open Science Center (LOSC) fulfills LIGO's commitment to release,
archive, and serve LIGO data in a broadly accessible way to the scientific
community and to the public, and to provide the information and tools necessary
to understand and use the data. In August 2014, the LOSC published the full
dataset from Initial LIGO's "S5" run at design sensitivity, the first such
large-scale release and a valuable testbed to explore the use of LIGO data by
non-LIGO researchers and by the public, and to help teach gravitational-wave
data analysis to students across the world. In addition to serving the S5 data,
the LOSC web portal (losc.ligo.org) now offers documentation, data-location and
data-quality queries, tutorials and example code, and more. We review the
mission and plans of the LOSC, focusing on the S5 data release.
