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Taylor & Francis Group is an international company originating in England that publishes books and
academic journal
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and d ...
s. Its parts include Taylor & Francis,
Routledge
Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law, and ...
,
F1000 Research or
Dovepress
Dove Medical Press is an academic publisher of open access peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals, with offices in Macclesfield, London (United Kingdom), Princeton, New Jersey (United States), and Auckland (New Zealand). In September 2017, ...
. It is a division of
Informa plc
Informa plc is a British publishing, business intelligence, and exhibitions group based in London, England. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
It has offices in 43 countries and around 11,00 ...
, a
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
–based publisher and conference company.
Overview
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.
Francis's 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
Imprint or imprinting may refer to:
Entertainment
* ''Imprint'' (TV series), Canadian television series
* "Imprint" (''Masters of Horror''), episode of TV show ''Masters of Horror''
* ''Imprint'' (film), a 2007 independent drama/thriller film
...
. 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
Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law, and ...
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
Fetter Lane is a street in the ward of Farringdon Without in the City of London. It forms part of the A4 road and runs between Fleet Street at its southern end and Holborn.
History
The street was originally called Faytor or Faiter Lane, then Fe ...
in London, and moved to its current headquarters in Milton Park, Oxfordshire. Taylor & Francis Group is now the academic publishing arm of Informa, and accounted for 30.2% of Group Revenue and 38.1% of Adjusted Profit in 2017.
In 2018 Informa PLC reported 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.
It uses the
Routledge
Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law, and ...
imprint for its publishing in humanities, social sciences, behavioural sciences, law and education, and the
CRC Press
The CRC Press, LLC is an American publishing group that specializes in producing technical books. Many of their books relate to engineering, science and mathematics. Their scope also includes books on business, forensics and information tec ...
imprint for its publishing in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In 2017, T&F sold assets from its
Garland Science
Garland Science was a publishing group that specialized in developing textbooks in a wide range of life sciences subjects, including cell biology, cell and molecular biology, immunology, protein chemistry, genetics, and bioinformatics. It was a su ...
imprint to
W. W. Norton & Company and then ceased to use that brand.
Although generally considered the smallest of the 'Big Four'
STEM
Stem or STEM may refer to:
Plant structures
* Plant stem, a plant's aboveground axis, made of vascular tissue, off which leaves and flowers hang
* Stipe (botany), a stalk to support some other structure
* Stipe (mycology), the stem of a mushro ...
publishers (
Reed-Elsevier,
Wiley-Blackwell
Wiley-Blackwell is an international scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons. It was formed by the merger of John Wiley & Sons Global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business with Blackwell Publish ...
,
Springer
Springer or springers may refer to:
Publishers
* Springer Science+Business Media, aka Springer International Publishing, a worldwide publishing group founded in 1842 in Germany formerly known as Springer-Verlag.
** Springer Nature, a multinationa ...
, and Taylor & Francis), its Routledge imprint is claimed to be the largest global academic publisher within humanities and social sciences. The company's journals have been delivered through the Taylor & Francis Online website since June 2011. Prior to that they were provided through the Informaworld website. Taylor & Francis ebooks are now available via the TaylorFrancis website. Taylor & Francis operates a number of Web services for its
digital content
Digital content is any content that exists in the form of digital data. Also known as digital media, digital content is stored on digital or analog storage in specific formats. Forms of digital content include information that is digitally broad ...
including Routledge Handbooks Online, the Routledge Performance Archive, Secret Intelligence Files and Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Taylor & Francis offers
Open Access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
publishing options in both its books and journals divisions and through its Cogent Open Access journals imprint.
Taylor & Francis is a member of several professional publishing bodies including the
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association
The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include ...
,
the
, the Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers and
The Publishers Association
The Publishers Association (PA) is the trade organisation serving book, journal and electronic publishers in the United Kingdom, established in 1896. Its mission is to strengthen the trading environment for UK publishers by providing a strong voice ...
. In 2017, after collaborating for several years, T&F bought specialist digital resources company
Colwiz
colwiz (''col''lective ''wiz''dom) is a free web, desktop and mobile based research management software, designed by researchers from the University of Oxford. colwiz incorporates reference management, collaboration and networking tools, as well ...
.
In January 2020, T&F bought open research publishing platform
F1000.
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
f knowledge
F, or f, is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ef'' (pronounced ), and the plural is ''efs''.
Hist ...
. The modern logo is a stylised oil lamp in a circle.
Company figures
The group has about 1,800 employees
in at least 18 offices worldwide. Its head office is in
Milton Park
Milton Park is a mixed use business and technology park in Oxfordshire, England, operated by MEPC plc.
It is just south of the village of Milton, about west of Didcot. It is on the site of a former Ministry of Defence depot between the A34 ...
,
Abingdon in the United Kingdom, with other offices in Stockholm,
Leiden
Leiden (; in English and archaic Dutch also Leyden) is a city and municipality in the province of South Holland, Netherlands. The municipality of Leiden has a population of 119,713, but the city forms one densely connected agglomeration wit ...
, New York,
Boca Raton
Boca Raton ( ; es, Boca Ratón, link=no, ) is a city in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. It was first incorporated on August 2, 1924, as "Bocaratone," and then incorporated as "Boca Raton" in 1925. The population was 97,422 in the ...
, Philadelphia,
Kentucky
Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north; West Virginia and Virginia to ...
, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai,
Taipei
Taipei (), officially Taipei City, is the capital and a special municipality of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Located in Northern Taiwan, Taipei City is an enclave of the municipality of New Taipei City that sits about southwest of the n ...
, Melbourne, Sydney, Cape Town, Tokyo and New Delhi.
Taylor & Francis reported a mean 2017
gender pay gap
The gender pay gap or gender wage gap is the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are working. Women are generally found to be paid less than men. There are two distinct numbers regarding the pay gap: non-adjusted ...
of 24.2% for its UK workforce, while the median was 8%. The fact that the average pay for women is significantly worse than the median pay (compared to men's) shows that women are underrepresented in the positions with the highest pay.
Controversies and evaluation
Journal protests
In 2013, the entire board of the ''
Journal of Library Administration
The ''Journal of Library Administration'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal that covers library management. It was established in 1980 and is published 8 times a year by Routledge. The editor-in-chief is Gary M. Pitkin (University of Northern Col ...
'' resigned in a dispute over author licensing agreements.
Academic practices
In 2016, ''
Critical Reviews in Toxicology'' was accused by the
Center for Public Integrity
The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) is an American nonprofit investigative journalism organization whose stated mission is "to reveal abuses of power, corruption and dereliction of duty by powerful public and private institutions in order to c ...
of being a "broker of junk science".
Monsanto
The Monsanto Company () was an American agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation founded in 1901 and headquartered in Creve Coeur, Missouri. Monsanto's best known product is Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide, developed in th ...
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
The ''International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health'' was a quarterly peer-reviewed public health journal with a focus on occupational and environmental health. It was established in 1995 and was published by Routledge. The last e ...
'', 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
The grievance studies affair, also referred to as the "Sokal Squared" scandal, was the project of a team of three authors—Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose—to highlight what they saw as poor scholarship and eroding cri ...
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
''Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography'' is a peer-reviewed journal published 12 times a year by Taylor & Francis. It is the leading international journal in feminist geography and it aims to provide "a forum for debate in human ...
'', which was also retracted later that year.
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
The European Mathematical Society (EMS) is a European organization dedicated to the development of mathematics in Europe. Its members are different mathematical societies in Europe, academic institutions and individual mathematicians. The current ...
condemned the retraction and later announced that Taylor & Francis had agreed to reverse the decision. Previous instances of Taylor & Francis journals discriminating against Iranian authors were reported in 2013.
In 2022 there has been much debate about the Accelerated Publication service offered by Taylor & Francis for some of its biomedical journals. For $7,000, a scientist can expedite the peer review process and be published in as few as three weeks.
Manipulation of bibliometrics
Self-citation
Coercive citation is an academic publishing practice in which an editor of a scientific or academic journal forces an author to add spurious citations to an article before the journal will agree to publish it. This is done to inflate the journal' ...
is a practise that can inflate the seeming prestige of a journal or group. In 2020, six T&F journals that exhibited unusual levels of
self-citation
Coercive citation is an academic publishing practice in which an editor of a scientific or academic journal forces an author to add spurious citations to an article before the journal will agree to publish it. This is done to inflate the journal' ...
, and as a consequence their
journal impact factor
The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as in ...
suspended from ''
Journal Citation Reports
''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Collect ...
''. 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.''
Evaluation
As of May 2022, 836 Taylor & Francis journals are listed in the
Norwegian Scientific Index
CRIStin (Current Research Information System in Norway) is the national research information system of Norway, and is owned by the Royal Ministry of Education and Research. CRIStin documents all scholarly publications by Norwegian researchers, an ...
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).
Acquired companies and discontinued imprints
See also
*
Taylor & Francis academic journals
Taylor, Taylors or Taylor's may refer to:
People
* Taylor (surname)
**List of people with surname Taylor
* Taylor (given name), including Tayla and Taylah
* Taylor sept, a branch of Scottish clan Cameron
* Justice Taylor (disambiguation)
Plac ...
References
Further reading
*
*
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Taylor and Francis
Academic publishing companies
Book publishing companies of the United Kingdom
Companies based in Oxfordshire
British companies established in 1798
Publishing companies established in 1798
Vale of White Horse
1798 establishments in England