In today’s day and age, technological advances have made data generation easy but processing, analysis and interpretation just as big a challenge.  A researcher at the Johns Hopkins Institute of Genetic Medicine has led the effort to compile to date the largest free resource of experimental information about human proteins. Reporting in the February issue of Nature Biotechnology, the research team describes how this will help all researchers around the globe to speed their research projects.  The newly created repository incorporates easy-to-use web forms so that all researchers can contribute and share data easily.  The project was made possible with scientists and software developers at the Institute of Bioinformatics, a nonprofit institute in Bangalore, India founded in 2002.  Like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Human Proteinpedia allows any researcher to contribute and edit their data as their research progresses. Researchers will be able to quickly review what has been discovered by others about their protein of interest, speeding their own work.  Human Proteinpedia contains information on when and where specific proteins are expressed or not, including in cells and tissues from diseases such as cancers; how the proteins are modified; which other proteins they interact with and much more. The repository includes only experimental data and doesn’t include computer-generated predictions, which may not turn out to be real. The current version of Human Proteinpedia compiles data provided by more than 71 laboratories from all over the world and contains entries for more than 15,230 human proteins.  The hope is that the scientific community from all across the globe will come together to contribute data generated in individual laboratories and that in the future companies like Google and Microsoft will be involved in enabling such data sharing and dissemination for biological data.  This will not only improve the quality of the data but also increase the pace at which data is collected in a common repository.