Our history

For more than two centuries Taylor & Francis has been fully committed to the publication of scholarly information of the highest quality, and this remains our primary goal today.

The foundations of our company were laid in pioneering fashion when in 1798 Richard Taylor launched the Philosophical Magazine, one of the first scientific journals produced by an independent company. It was the start of many subsequent close collaborations with scholarly societies.

Dr William Francis, a chemist, joined Richard Taylor in 1852 and continued the tradition of the close links between the academic community and the company.

In 1936 Taylor & Francis became a private limited company with leading scientists as directors and shareholders. The last two decades have seen the most dramatic and rapid growth with the setting up of publishing and distribution centers around the world. This growth, fueled by significant and strategic acquisition, led to a successful flotation of the Group on the London Stock Exchange in 1998. Shortly after the flotation, the Group more than doubled in size with the acquisition of the Routledge Group of companies.

In 2004 Taylor & Francis merged with Informa, and in 2005 consolidated its imprints. This led to such imprints as Carfax, Frank Cass, Marcel Dekker, Spon Press, Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, amongst others, being incorporated into the CRC Press, Routledge or Taylor & Francis brands.

Taylor & Francis Group continues in its mission to publish the highest quality academic research and this has been reflected in the more recent acquisitions of Focal Press, Earthscan, Haworth Press, Heldref Publications and PeerJ.

• In 2003, Routledge published a history of Taylor & Francis called The Lamp Of Learning: Taylor & Francis And Two Centuries Of Publishing.
• In 2004, Taylor & Francis merged with Informa and has been the academic publishing division of Informa plc since then.
• In 2017, Taylor & Francis acquired Dove Medical Press, which was founded in 2003 as an open access publisher specializing primarily in medical journals.
• In 2020, Taylor & Francis acquired F1000 Research, which was founded in 2000 and provides open research publishing venues which support data deposition and sharing to research funders and institutions, including the European Commission, Wellcome and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as directly to researchers through its own open research publishing platform, F1000Research.
• In 2021, Taylor & Francis acquired Prufrock Press, the industry’s leading resource for gifted, advanced and twice-exceptional learners.
• In 2023, Taylor & Francis expanded its medical publishing with the acquisition of 27 new journals and six digital hubs from former biomedical publisher Future Science Group (FSG).
• In 2024, Taylor & Francis acquired PeerJ, an award-winning Open Access science publisher with seven fully Open Access journals in biomedical, life, environmental, physical, and computer sciences.