Taylor & Francis

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. Publications included the Philosophical Magazine.

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

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. Acquisition of other publishers has remained a core part of the group's business strategy. It merged with Informa in 2004 to create a new company called T&F Informa, since renamed back to Informa. 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.

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

Evaluation and controversies

As of May 2022, 836 Taylor & Francis journals are listed in the Norwegian Scientific Index of which 753 have a rating of "level 1" (meets academic standard), 70 have a rating "level 2" (the highest level, indicating rigorous academic quality), one has a rating of "level X" (decision on rating in progress), and 13 have a rating of "level 0" (indicating non-academic quality).

Taylor & Francis has faced criticism for its use of author licensing agreements, and several of their journals have been criticized or retracted papers due to concerns over review and publishing practices.

Journal protests

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

Academic practices

In 2016, Critical Reviews in Toxicology was accused by the Center for Public Integrity of being a "broker of junk science". 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".

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.

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. When the authors announced the hoax, the article was retracted. 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.