Challenges (ISSN 2078-1547) is a unique open access journal that publishes ideas for research projects (research proposals), research plans, perspectives or ideas for solving grand challenges, descriptions of tested and untested prototypes and other similar material. Its content is typically not publishable in a research journal. But it has wider scholarly or scientific relevance and should be publicized in a journal, such as Challenges.

Challenges can also be contests. The aim of this contest is to spur innovation and collaboration amongst scientists or scholars. The journal Challenges now supports the announcement of contests, and publication of contest proceedings. Previously, we have published the proceedings of the Critical Assessment of Small Molecule Identification (CASMI) contest in another MDPI journal Metabolites (see here for the contest proceedings Special Issue).

First contest published in Challenges

The journal Challenges and MDPI will be sponsoring a prize of 2000 CHF for the winner of the contest. The aim is to identify the best open source cheminformatic tool of the year. To enter the competition, the authors of such tools are invited to make the source code of their tool openly available (for instance using GitHub) and send a 1–2 pages description of the tool by e-mail to Dr. Luc Patiny (luc.patiny@epfl.ch).

The journal Challenges will publish the description papers after editorial review. The winner of the contest will be invited to present his/her tool at the 9th Workshop in Chemical Information at the EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland on 12 September 2014 (see the preliminary program), where the prize will also be awarded.

We are looking forward to the response and tools submitted to this first contest!

Feel free to reach out to us if you have ideas for scholarly or scientifically relevant contests. You can use the comments box below and also send us an e-mail to challenges@mdpi.com.

Update

The contest is over.