When NASA established the Planetary Data System (PDS) in the late 1980s, its mandate to the PDS was not merely to preserve the bytes from NASA’s planetary science missions, but to maintain the usability of the data for present and future generations. Two fundamental pillars support this ambitious goal: The external peer review required for acceptance of all archived data submissions; and the PDS Standards for data and metadata formatting and completeness. The PDS external peer review process is at least equivalent to, if not more rigorous than, the journal refereeing process(1). Data reviewers who are field experts but not affiliated with the data preparer, nor involved in the PDS consulting process, are brought in to review documentation and completeness. They are specifically charged to attempt to use the data to perform some scientific investigation (reproducing published results, comparison to correlated observations for consistency, etc.). If the reviewers are not successful, the impediments are documented and the data submission is amended by the preparer until the reviewers are satisfied. This process demonstrates immediate usability of the data. The PDS Standards, and in particular the recently-implemented version based on the PDS4 Information Model, require exhaustive metadata documenting data structure, observing circumstances, provenance, analytical metadata, and so on using the same templates across the entire archive. The associated schematic enforcement of at least minimal requirements for metadata completeness and quality provides a foundation for discoverability, interoperability, and usability of data from disparate sources throughout the archive. Together, the PDS external peer review and the Information Model-based PDS4 standards ensure both quality and usability for data accepted into the PDS archive, for this and future generations of planetary scientists. Reference: (1) Raugh, A. and Bauer, J., PDS Data Sets as Peer-Reviewed References, Poster presented at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society Meeting, 03-08 June 2018, Honolulu, Hawai’i.