About This Journal
Animal Sentience [ASent] is the first academic journal fully devoted to the capacity of nonhuman animal species to feel and to think. There is a distinction between sentience--the capacity to feel—and "sapience"--the capacity to think—but feeling is closely intertwined with thinking. Submissions concerning the relationship between consciousness and cognition are sccordingly welcome.
ASent is a peer-reviewed, cross-disciplinary, open-access journal publishing "target articles" that report important empirical and theoretical findings as well as integrative reviews concerning animal sentience. Each target article is followed by multiple commentary articles that analyze its scientific, practical, methodological, ecological, ethical, philosophical, social, and legal implications. The two main criteria for acceptance are scientific soundness and appropriateness for multi-specialty commentary
ASent is indexed in DOAJ, SCOPUS, and Crossref.
Open Access
Animal Sentience conforms to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI: See https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/ (2019). All content in Animal Sentience is freely available to individuals and institutions immediately upon publication. There is no embargo period. Users may "read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of the articles" (1) Each target article and commentary article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (2019).
No Charges for Submission, Processing, Publication, Subscription or Access.
The costs of both publication and access-provision are fully subsidized by WellBeing International.
Publication Schedule
Animal Sentience is an online-only journal. Target articles and commentary articles are published (posted) as soon as they are accepted for publication. The journal is organized into annual volumes (Volume 1 appeared in 2016). Target articles are identified by their year of publication and as the Nth target article published since the journal began (for example, the thirtieth target article, published in 2020 by authors Wiebers & Feigin, is archived as (2020) 30(1)). The "(1)" identifies the target article as the head of its "thread" of commentaries and author-responses. The Kona-Boun (2020) commentary on Wiebers & Feigin (2020) is 19th in the commentary thread 30(20). Wiebers & Feigin's Response to the 28 commentaries that have appeared so far was published in 2021, so Wiebers & Feigin 2021 has an article and thread number (30)(30).
As an on-line only journal, Animal Sentience can make any necessary corrections in already published articles after publication, identified by date.