Submitting your first proteomics paper? Do this or don't bother submitting it!

We are SO SO SO very excited that you are moving past the GENotype and are intertested in actually measuring PHENOtypic data (or close to it) by doing proteomics. 

For real - so so so so so very excited to see all of these new technologies. Even if you are using SomaScam or something smarter and more accurate like doing 4,000 separate ELISAs. We're all excited that you are doing it rather than filling every repository on earth with petabytes of more short read transcript level data.

However - now that you are here - THERE ARE RULES. And unless you are threatening patient confidentiality you don't get around these rules because you're new here.

There aren't a lot of rules, but if I'm reviewing your paper the first thing I check is 

1) IS YOUR DATA PUBLICLY AVAILABLE FOR ME TO LOOK AT? 

No? 

Save yourself the time and just don't submit it. It saves me SO MUCH TIME to just look for your data and find that you've just put the R plots on Zenodo or your "RAW data" is a .CSV or Excel file and just reject it on the spot. 

And if you're too confident to read about your new field at all and thinking "I should start an initiative and find a way to make proteomics data publicly accessible. 

We have these things! 

We've almost ALWAYS had these things! 

Look - I don't review every paper. But I don't have my ORCID set up properly with every journals stupid format so I review a lot more than it looks like. I've ruined a lot of lunch breaks this year already and I've recommended rejection of more papers in 2025 so far than in the rest of my career combined. It is legitimately not that hard to make your data available. Edit: 5/5/2025, check out this new post that includes heavy hitting editors in proteomics talking about this same issue AND a video that shows you how to upload proteomics data!