We’d like to invite the experimental and computational mass spectrometry community to participate in an open contest on the identification of small molecules from mass spectrometry data.

The identification of unknowns is the major challenge in metabolomics, environmental sciences and other fields, yet the exchange of ideas and a systematic comparative evaluation of alternative strategies is quite limited. In CASMI we publish spectral information for a set of compounds, and call for proposed identifications. The participants can submit their proposals under any of the categories outlined here, to allow the assessment of different identification strategies in the contest. The contest is inspired by the CASP contest series, the "critical assessment of (protein) structure prediction", initiated in 1994.

With this contest, we aim to bring these communities together and show off their different methods on a common data set. Thus, although this is a competition, all participants should benefit and the real winner is the field of small molecule identification.

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