Well validated antibodies are crucial to progress in a wide range of life science disciplines, but validating an antibody is a complex and ongoing process. Antibody validation is often carried out as preliminary work to a larger study so the validation data may go unpublished and needless duplication of efforts can occur. This collection of articles in F1000Research provides a home for papers describing antibody validation studies. Our goal is to encourage publishing of all studies, both positive and negative, which increase understanding of how antibodies perform. These could range from large studies with thousands of antibodies to small single figure studies which validate an individual antibody for a specific purpose. Opinion or Correspondence articles considering any aspect of antibody validation are also welcome. Here, we provide an introduction to the collection which we hope will grow and become a valuable resource for the many thousands of researchers who use antibodies.