The field of proteomics has seen tremendous advances over the past 20 years, with the emergence of faster and more sensitive instruments, new acquisition workflows that collect more data on more ions per run, and more advanced software capable of better analysis on far greater volumes of data. The identification and quantification of half of the entire proteome in a single run is becoming feasible, facilitating the collection of information about protein abundances, molecular interactions, and protein functions at tremendous scale. Driving these advances is a diverse ecosystem of data analysis software packages, both from academic laboratories as well as from commercial companies. The benefit of such diversity is enhanced if there is also a robust set of standardized data formats that enables the interoperability of the software and also between software and bioinformatics data resources, such as the members of the ProteomeXchange and IMEx 6 consortia, for MS proteomics and molecular interaction data, respectively. Although some data types are relatively simple such that ad hoc tab-delimited formats are sufficient, most proteomics data types are sufficiently complex that information-rich structured formats are necessary to avoid massive loss of metadata and provenance information. An important effort in the biomedical research field overall is to promote making all data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), and officially approved and recognized standards is a major component in the effort to make data FAIR .