The goal of the participants is to determine the correct molecular structure, based on the data provided by the contest organisers.

The CASMI contest comes with a set of rules that aim to clarify how the submissions will be evaluated and ranked. This ensures that the evaluation criteria are transparent, objective and known in advance. All contributions should follow the principles of reproducible research and accurately describe how the results were achieved.

All the MS/MS data will be available as peak lists, mz(X)ML and the respective vendor format. For Categories 2 and 3, a fixed set of candidate structures will also be provided for each challenge as SDF and CSV (SMILES, InChI, InChIKey) files, along with a CSV summarizing the "known" and "unknown" compounds in each mix.

From the submissions, several result pages and tables will be created automatically, so the submissions need to obey to a particular format. The details are given on the Submission and Evaluation page.

The contest has three categories this year, with different aims and restrictions on the information available and allowed to be used.

Participants can enter a maximum of three submissions per approach and category, if they wish to assess the influence of different strategies on the outcomes. The rationale behind the different submissions must be detailed clearly in the abstract. Only the best overall performing submission per participant will be considered in declaring the winner(s).

A bottle of wine will be awarded to the winner of each category.