Our history

Richard Taylor laid the foundations of our company when he launched the Philosophical Magazine. This was one of the very first scientific journals. It was also the start of our long history of working with scholarly societies. Today we partner with more than 700.

George Routledge and Frederick Warne founded George Routledge & Co. Routledge became the leading English-language publisher of humanities and social sciences. Its authors include Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Judith Butler, and Stuart Hall. We acquired Routledge in 1998.

Dr William Francis, a chemist, joined Richard Taylor. Together they continued to develop close links between the academic community and the company.

Taylor & Francis became a private limited company. The directors and shareholders were all leading scientists.

We started publishing books. The book publishing side of our business goes back to the launch of Wykeham Publications. We now publish over 8,000 books each year.

We acquired Hemisphere Publishing. We also renamed the company Taylor & Francis Group to reflect our growing number of imprints.

We floated on the London Stock Exchange. Two hundred years after our first journal launched, this was a big year for us. We became a public company, following a period of rapid growth. Then, shortly after the flotation, we acquired Routledge. This more than doubled our size. The merged company became one of the top five research publishers globally.

We acquired CRC Press. This is a publishing group that specializes in technical books. Also in this year, Routledge published a history of Taylor & Francis. It was called ‘The Lamp of Learning: Taylor & Francis and Two Centuries of Publishing’. The lamp has always been part of our brand. The old Taylor & Francis logo was a hand pouring oil into a lit lamp, along with the Latin phrase ‘alere flammam’ (‘to feed the flame [of knowledge]’). Our current logo is a stylized oil lamp in a circle.

We merged with Informa. We are proud to be the academic publishing arm of this world leader in business intelligence, academic publishing, knowledge, and events.

We consolidated our imprints. This led to imprints such as Carfax, Frank Cass, Marcel Dekker, Spon Press, and Swets & Zeitlinger being incorporated into the CRC Press, Routledge, or Taylor & Francis brands. More acquisitions followed. These included Focal Press, Earthscan, Haworth Press, and Heldref Publications.

We acquired Dove Medical Press. Founded in 2003, this open access publisher specializes in medical journals.

We acquired F1000 Research. Founded in 2000, this provides open research publishing solutions to research organizations, learned societies, institutions, and funders.

We acquired Prufrock Press. This offers resources to teachers and parents to help gifted, advanced, special needs, and twice-exceptional learners succeed.

We expanded our medical publishing with the acquisition of 27 new journals. We also added six new digital hubs. These are online communities for medical and scientific professionals. We expanded the publishing solutions we offer to medical communications agencies, including our Plain Language Summary service.

We acquired PeerJ, an award-winning open access science publisher. PeerJ has seven open access journals in biomedical, life, environmental, physical, and computer sciences.