Several journals in the field of proteomics have decided to mandate data sharing at the time of publication. These journals are leading the way toward data sharing out of a conviction that “the provenance of data sets and their proper citation is central to the research process,” as described in a recent commentary in Bio-IT World,  Share the Data: Making Large-Scale Proteomics Data Widely Available.

Mass Spectrometer, photo from U.S. Department of Energy Genome Programs

Now “authors who publish a manuscript containing mass spectrometry data in Molecular and Cellular Proteomics (MCP) must submit the raw data to a publicly accessible site.”   The journal Proteomics also requires data deposit in a public archive.

There are several specialized data repositories in the field, and several are working together as ProteomExchange “to provide a single point of submission to proteomics repositories, and encourage the data exchange and sharing of identifiers between the repositories so that the community may easily find datasets in the participating repositories.”