About the Journal

Named in honor of Dr. Lois Kent (1912–1999), curator of paleontology at the Illinois State Geological Survey from 1956 until her retirement in 1985, Kentiana is an international, peer-reviewed open access journal aimed at disseminating paleontological research conducted at or in association/collaboration with the Center for Paleontology, the Illinois Natural History and State Geological surveys, and academic departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Papers from researchers outside of the University of Illinois that are based on specimens from the Center for Paleontology collections are also eligible for publication in Kentiana. The journal covers the full scope of paleontology including, but not limited to, taxonomy, systematics, phylogenetics, micropaleontology, paleoecology, taphonomy, and biostratigraphy.

Papers are published as stand-alone issues under a single sequential enumeration scheme, with each paper receiving its own unique issue number and DOI, and appearing online in the archive as soon as they become ready. All papers that include the description of new taxa will be assigned the necessary Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) and registered in the appropriate digital repositories (ZooBank, IPNI, MycoBank, etc.) in order to conform to regulations concerning the proper online publication of new taxonomic names as set out in the appropriate codes of nomenclature. Kentiana is archived in the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS) at the University of Illinois, and where appropriate, datasets can be deposited in the Illinois Data Bank and assigned their own DOIs. Kentiana is part of the Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN).

Kentiana is a Diamond Open Access journal so the journal is free to access and there are no publication fees for authors. Authors retain copyright in their works but provide a non-exclusive license to Kentiana to publish their work under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.