An X-ray crystallography structure of the trimeric nuclear export complex of CRM1, SNP1 and RanGTP is available on the PDB database with the ID 3GJX. To get an XL-MS dataset of a clean sample of a stable protein complex for benchmarking purposes, another sample from the protein expression, purification and complex assembly employed in the crystallography study was also cross-linked and analyzed by mass spectrometry. The tools OpenPepXL, pLink 2, Kojak, StavroX, XiSearch and xQuest were used to analyze this dataset with comparable search settings.