Taylor & Francis

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Taylor & Francis Group's original logo showed a hand pouring oil into a lit lamp. Below it ran a Latin phrase, alere flammam, meaning to feed the flame of knowledge. That emblem crowned a business built on peer review and editorial trust. Today, journals carrying the Taylor & Francis name have retracted papers, replaced editors under pressure, and faced accusations of discriminating against authors from one country. A partnership between two men grew into an academic publishing group whose journals and books reach well beyond the fields it started in. This documentary follows how that growth happened, and what has strained the trust the company's oldest logo once promised.

• 2. Origins And Growth

  ›

  William Francis joined Richard Taylor's publishing business in 1852, forming the partnership that gave the company its name. Taylor had founded the original firm back in 1798. Their catalogue ranged across agriculture, chemistry, education, engineering, geography, law, mathematics, medicine, and the social sciences. Among their publications was the Philosophical Magazine, a journal that carried scientific research across those fields. Francis' son, Richard Taunton Francis, was born in 1883. He served as the firm's sole partner from 1917 until his death in 1930. His death closed the family's direct stewardship of the firm, just before the business entered decades of expansion into new imprints and new markets.

• 3. Building An Empire

  ›

  In 1965, Taylor & Francis launched Wykeham Publications, moving the firm into book publishing for the first time. It acquired Hemisphere Publishing in 1988, and around that time took on the name Taylor & Francis Group to reflect its growing list of imprints. In 1990, the company left the printing side of the business entirely to focus on publishing. It went public on the London Stock Exchange in 1998, the same year it bought its academic rival Routledge for £90 million. Acquiring other publishers became a core part of the group's ongoing strategy. In 2004, Taylor & Francis merged with Informa, a UK-based publisher and conference company. Together they formed a combined business called T&F Informa, later renamed simply Informa. The merger closed Routledge's historic office on New Fetter Lane in London and moved headquarters to Milton Park, near Abingdon-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. In 2017, the company sold assets from its Garland Science imprint to W. W. Norton & Company and stopped using that name. That same year, after years of working together, it bought the specialist digital resources company Colwiz. In January 2020, it added the open research platform F1000 to the group. That deal gave Taylor & Francis a foothold in open research. At the same time, the volume and pace of its journal output were starting to draw closer scrutiny.

• 4. Scale And Reach

  ›

  By 2018, according to a report from Informa PLC, Taylor & Francis was publishing more than 2,700 journals and about 7,000 new books every year. Its backlist held over 140,000 titles, available in both print and digital formats. Today the group's imprints include Taylor & Francis, CRC Press, Routledge, F1000 Research, and Dovepress. Its current logo simplifies that original oil-lamp design into a stylised lamp inside a circle. The Routledge imprint carries the list in the humanities, social sciences, behavioural sciences, law, and education. The CRC Press imprint covers science, technology, engineering, and mathematics instead. In 2017, Taylor & Francis accounted for 30.2% of Informa's group revenue and 38.1% of its adjusted profit. Despite that output, Taylor & Francis is ranked as the smallest of the so-called 'Big Four' STEM publishers, behind RELX, Wiley-Blackwell, and Springer Science+Business Media. In its area of humanities and social sciences, though, the analytics firm Simba Information ranked things differently. It named Informa, including the Taylor & Francis imprint, the leading global academic publisher for 2016-2020. Readers reach its journals through the Taylor & Francis Online website and its ebooks through a separate Taylor & Francis site. Both books and journals offer Open Access publishing options. Additional digital services include Routledge Handbooks Online, the Routledge Performance Archive, and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. The company also holds memberships in several professional publishing bodies. These include the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association and the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers. Its memberships also cover the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers and the Publishers Association. Taylor & Francis is a signatory of the SDG Publishers Compact. It has replaced plastic mailing packaging with responsibly sourced paper. It has also achieved CarbonNeutral certification for its print books and journals. That same public reporting also detailed the workforce that keeps this catalogue running.

• 5. Inside The Numbers

  ›

  The group employs about 1,800 people across at least 18 offices worldwide. Beyond its Oxfordshire headquarters, those offices reach across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. They include Stockholm, Leiden, New York City, Boca Raton, Philadelphia, and Kentucky, along with Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, and Taipei. Further offices operate in Melbourne, Sydney, Cape Town, Tokyo, and New Delhi. In 2017, Taylor & Francis reported a mean gender pay gap of 24.2% for its UK workforce. The median gap was smaller, at 8%. That gap between the mean and the median points to a specific pattern. Women are underrepresented in the company's highest-paid roles compared with men in similar positions. Pay wasn't the only place the company faced scrutiny. Its journals themselves would soon draw much closer examination.

• 6. Peer Review Under Fire

  ›

  As of May 2022, 836 Taylor & Francis journals appeared in the Norwegian Scientific Index. Of those, 753 held a level 1 rating, meeting the index's baseline academic standard. Seventy earned the top level 2 rating for rigorous academic quality. One journal sat at level X, pending a decision, while 13 were rated level 0, indicating non-academic quality. Separately, author licensing agreements have drawn ongoing criticism, and several journals have faced criticism or retraction over their review and publishing practices. In 2013, the entire board of the Journal of Library Administration resigned. Their dispute centered on the same kind of author licensing agreements that critics had raised elsewhere. In 2016, the Center for Public Integrity accused Critical Reviews in Toxicology of acting as a broker of junk science. Monsanto was found to have worked with an outside consulting firm to induce the journal into publishing a biased review. That review covered the health effects of its product, Roundup. In 2017, Taylor & Francis removed the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health. That editor had accepted articles critical of corporate interests. The company replaced the editor with a corporate consultant, doing so without consulting the editorial board. In 2017, the Grievance studies affair hoax project targeted Taylor & Francis directly. Its journal Cogent Social Sciences accepted an article titled 'The conceptual penis as a social construct'. Another Taylor & Francis journal, Norma: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, had already rejected the paper, but suggested Cogent Social Sciences as a better fit. Once the authors revealed the hoax, Cogent Social Sciences retracted the article. In 2018, a second hoax paper from the same project reached print. Titled 'Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon', it appeared in the journal Gender, Place & Culture. That article was also retracted later in 2018. In December 2018, the journal Dynamical Systems accepted a paper titled 'Saturation of Generalized Partially Hyperbolic Attractors'. After publication, the journal retracted it because of the authors' Iranian nationality. The European Mathematical Society condemned the retraction publicly. Taylor & Francis later agreed to reverse its decision. Similar instances of the company discriminating against Iranian authors had already been reported back in 2013. By 2022, the company's Accelerated Publication service was drawing considerable debate for some of its biomedical journals. For $7,000, a scientist could speed up peer review and see a paper published in as few as three weeks. Retraction and editorial disputes were not the only way T&F journals came under examination. Their citation patterns were about to draw attention too.

• 7. Counting Citations

  ›

  In 2020, the analytics company Clarivate flagged six Taylor & Francis journals for unusually high levels of self-citation. That kind of self-citation is a practice that can inflate a journal's apparent prestige. Clarivate suspended all six journals from its Journal Citation Reports, and their impact factors dropped as a result. In April 2022, an article in the Taylor & Francis journal Accountability in Research examined some of the factors behind that pattern of repeated suspensions. Impact factors were one measure of trust in the company's journals. A different kind of scrutiny, aimed at the business itself rather than its citations, was building in the background.

• 8. Lawsuits And Partnerships

  ›

  In September 2024, Lucina Uddin, a neuroscience professor at UCLA, filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Taylor & Francis and five other academic journal publishers. The suit alleges the publishers violated antitrust law by agreeing not to compete against each other for manuscripts. It also alleges they denied scholars payment for peer review services. Taylor & Francis publishes climate change research, yet it has also partnered with the oil and gas company ExxonMobil. Climate scientists worry that partnership creates a conflict of interest that could undermine the credibility of climate science. Their concern rests on a belief that fossil fuel extraction and climate action are incompatible. In 2024, Taylor & Francis faced criticism after selling its authors' research to Microsoft as part of an AI partnership. The deal gave Microsoft non-exclusive access to that content and data to help improve its AI systems. Taylor & Francis made the arrangement without informing or seeking consent from the authors whose work was involved. Academics reacted with surprise and concern, raising questions about transparency, fair compensation, and the impact on academic research. The Society of Authors also raised concerns, saying publishers should consult creators before entering such deals and consider the implications for the wider creative industries. That objection leaves open a larger question about what authors are owed once their published work trains a system without their consent.