Within the framework of the INTOR activities, a collection of experimental data from major tokamaks in the world was started, to provide the tokamak community with quantitative information on a choice of well documented discharges that can be used as a starting point for further analysis of the physics of tokamak plasmas. The response was excellent. It was therefore decided to publish these data in Nuclear Fusion as a Special Topic, after a check and updating by the contributors. Since the responsibility for the correctness of the data is with the persons who provided them, the data are published under their authorship. It is hoped that collecting and publishing representative tokamak data will become a continuing effort so that, after some time, there will be a data collection that is significantly wider than what can be found in published articles and reports and that can be easily accessed. The data will also be kept in a special database at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Plasmaphysik (IPP), Garching, using the ORACLE system; they can be made available upon request on a data carrier.