Taylor & Francis grew from an 18th-century printer into an academic giant
Richard Taylor started a printing and publishing business in 1798, and William Francis joined him in 1852. Their firm put out the Philosophical Magazine. Today Taylor & Francis, owned by Informa, publishes more than 2,700 journals and roughly 7,000 new books a year, with a backlist above 140,000 titles.
For most of its life the company was a science printer. It only moved into books in 1965 with Wykeham Publications, took the name Taylor & Francis Group in 1988 after buying Hemisphere Publishing, and gave up printing altogether in 1990. Growth by acquisition then became the strategy. In 1998 it floated on the London Stock Exchange and bought its rival Routledge for £90 million; in 2004 it merged with Informa, and it later added the open research platform F1000. Routledge now covers humanities, law and social science, while CRC Press handles science and engineering.
It is usually counted as the smallest of the four big STEM publishers, alongside RELX, Wiley-Blackwell and Springer. Head office sits at Milton Park in Oxfordshire, with about 1,800 staff across offices from Stockholm to Tokyo. Its old emblem showed a hand pouring oil into a burning lamp beside the Latin motto alere flammam, to feed the flame of knowledge.
The flame has been singed from time to time. In 2013 the whole editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration quit over author licensing terms. One of its journals accepted a hoax paper in the 2017 grievance studies affair, and a mathematics journal retracted a paper because its authors were Iranian, reversing course after protests from the European Mathematical Society. A 2022 fast-track service let biomedical authors pay $7,000 for publication in as little as three weeks.
In 2024 it drew anger for licensing authors' research to Microsoft to train AI systems without asking the writers, and a UCLA neuroscientist, Lucina Uddin, named it in an antitrust suit against six publishers.
Source: Taylor & Francis
