Founding

The company was founded in 1852 when William Francis joined Richard Taylor in his publishing business. Taylor had founded his company in 1798. Their subjects covered agriculture, chemistry, education, engineering, geography, law, mathematics, medicine, and social sciences.^[8]

Francis's son, Richard Taunton Francis (1883–1930), was sole partner in the firm from 1917 to 1930.^[9]

Acquisitions and mergers

In 1965, Taylor & Francis launched Wykeham Publications and began book publishing. T&F acquired Hemisphere Publishing in 1988, and the company was renamed Taylor & Francis Group to reflect the growing number of imprints. Taylor & Francis left the printing business in 1990, to concentrate on publishing. In 1998 it went public on the London Stock Exchange and in the same year bought its academic publishing rival Routledge for £90 million.^[10] Acquisition of other publishers has remained a core part of the group's business strategy.^[10] It merged with Informa in 2004 to create a new company called T&F Informa, since renamed back to Informa.^[10] Following the merger, T&F closed the historic Routledge office at New Fetter Lane in London, and moved to its current headquarters in Milton Park, Oxfordshire.^[11]

In 2017, T&F sold assets from its Garland Science imprint to W. W. Norton & Company and then ceased to use that brand.^[12][13] In 2017, after collaborating for several years, T&F bought specialist digital resources company Colwiz.^[14][15] In January 2020, T&F bought open research publishing platform F1000.^[16]

Activities

In 2018 Informa PLC reported that Taylor & Francis publishes more than 2,700 journals, and about 7,000 new books each year, with a backlist of over 140,000 titles available in print and digital formats.^[13] It uses the Routledge imprint for its publishing in humanities, social sciences, behavioural sciences, law and education, and the CRC Press imprint for its publishing in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.^[13]

As the academic publishing arm of Informa, Taylor & Francis Group accounted for 30.2% of group revenue and 38.1% of adjusted profit in 2017.^[13] Taylor & Francis is generally considered the smallest of the 'Big Four' science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) publishers (Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis).^[17] Informa (including the Taylor & Francis imprint) was ranked by Simba Information as the leading global academic publisher in the areas of humanities and social sciences, in Global Social Science & Humanities Publishing 2016-2020.^[18]

The company's journals are delivered through the Taylor & Francis Online website^[19] and its ebooks through the Taylor & Francis website.^[20] Taylor & Francis offers Open Access publishing options in both its books^[21] and journals.^[22][13] Its digital content services include Routledge Handbooks Online,^[23] the Routledge Performance Archive,^[24] and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.^[25]

Taylor & Francis is a member of several professional publishing bodies including the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA),^[26] the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM),^[27] the Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)^[28] and The Publishers Association (PA).^[29]

Taylor & Francis is a signatory of the SDG Publishers Compact,^[30][31] and has taken steps to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These include replacing plastic with responsibly-sourced paper packaging to mail journals^[32] and achieving CarbonNeutral® publication certification for their print books and journals.^[33]

The old Taylor and Francis logo depicts a hand pouring oil into a lit lamp, along with the Latin phrase alere flammam – "to feed the flame [of knowledge]". The modern logo is a stylised oil lamp in a circle.^[26]

Journal protests

In 2013, the entire board of the Journal of Library Administration resigned in a dispute over author licensing agreements.^[38]

Academic practices

In 2016, Critical Reviews in Toxicology was accused by the Center for Public Integrity of being a "broker of junk science".^[41] Monsanto was found to have worked with an outside consulting firm to induce the journal to publish a biased review of the health effects of its product "Roundup".^[42]

In 2017, Taylor & Francis was strongly criticized for removing the editor-in-chief of International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, who accepted articles critical of corporate interests. The company replaced the editor with a corporate consultant without consulting the editorial board.^[43]

In 2017 as part of the Grievance studies affair hoax articles, the T&F journal Cogent Social Sciences accepted one of "The conceptual penis as a social construct" that had previously been rejected by another Taylor & Francis journal, Norma: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, which suggested the study would be a good fit for Cogent Social Sciences.^[44][45] When the authors announced the hoax, the article was retracted.^[46] In 2018, another Grievance studies affair article "Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon" was published in Gender, Place & Culture, which was also retracted later that year.^[40][47]

In December 2018, the journal Dynamical Systems accepted the paper Saturation of Generalized Partially Hyperbolic Attractors only to have it retracted after publication due to the Iranian nationality of the authors. The European Mathematical Society condemned the retraction and later announced that Taylor & Francis had agreed to reverse the decision.^[48] Previous instances of Taylor & Francis journals discriminating against Iranian authors were reported in 2013.^[49][50]

In 2022 there has been much debate about the Accelerated Publication service offered by Taylor & Francis for some of its biomedical journals.^[51][52] For $7,000, a scientist can expedite the peer review process and be published in as few as three weeks.^[39]

Manipulation of bibliometrics

Self-citation is a practice that can inflate the seeming prestige of a journal or group. In 2020, six T&F journals were found by analytics company Clarivate that exhibited unusual levels of self-citation, and as a consequence they were suspended from Journal Citation Reports and saw a drop in their journal impact factors.^[53] An April 2022 article in the T&F journal Accountability in Research outlined some of the factors leading to consistent suspension from Journal Citation Reports.^[54]

Antitrust lawsuit

In September 2024, Lucina Uddin, a neuroscience professor at UCLA, sued Taylor & Francis along with five other academic journal publishers in a proposed class-action lawsuit, alleging that the publishers violated antitrust law by agreeing not to compete against each other for manuscripts and by denying scholars payment for peer review services.^[55][56]