About the Taylor & Francis Group
Taylor & Francis, founded in the City of London in 1798, is one of the oldest commercial journals publisher in the world, and one of the leading global academic publishers. We publish over 900 peer-reviewed research journals and around 1,800 new books each year: our backlist is in excess of 20,000 specialist titles. Taylor & Francis is part of the Academic Division of Informa plc.
History
Taylor & Francis was founded as a printer and publisher of scientific journals: Philosophical Magazine – now a journal of condensed matter physics - has remained in continuous publication since then. Taylor & Francis has always been known as a shaper of disciplines and as a company of intellectual excitement. Through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions it has become one of the world's leading imprints for scientific books and journals. The name Taylor & Francis has long been associated with a pre-eminent tradition of scholarly scientific publishing.
The foundations of the 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. 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 joining the company as directors and shareholders. Our past Presidents include the late Professor Sir Neville Mott, Nobel Laureate and Fellow of the Royal Society.
Taylor & Francis grew by acquisition through the second half of the 20th century, acquiring the publishing businesses of Crane-Russak, Falmer Press, Hemisphere Publishing, Brunner-Mazel, UCL Press, Garland Publishing, Accelerated Development, Martin Dunitz, Curzon Publishing and the European business of Lawrence Erlbaum, which was re-branded and re-launched as Psychology Press. Psychology Press, based in Hove, publishes an impressive portfolio of psychology textbooks, monographs, professional books, tests, and journals.
In 1998, Taylor & Francis floated on the London Stock Exchange, and later that year, acquired the Routledge company, itself a publisher of some heritage. Routledge was founded in 1836, when George Routledge (1812-1888) set up a publishing firm with W. H. Warne. George Routledge and Co. was set up in 1851 with Frederick Warne, becoming Routledge, Warne & Routledge in 1858, and George Routledge and Sons when Warne left. After refinancing in 1902, the company took over J. C. Nimmo Ltd in 1903. In 1912 an amalgamation with Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. created Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., a major London publishing house. Routledge itself had acquired Carfax journals in 1997, becoming one of the largest and most important global imprints for journals in the social sciences, arts, and humanities.
Taylor & Francis has continued to go from strength to strength, positioning itself for the demands of academic research in the 21st century. There followed further acquisitions of the publishing concerns of Gordon & Breach, Frank Cass, Swets & Zeitlinger and Marcel Dekker, until in 2004 Taylor & Francis merged with Informa to create a global force in the fields of events management, business-to-business magazines, subscription publications and publishing services.
Philosophy
The Taylor & Francis Group strives to be the provider of choice for reliable, value-added, validated (via peer review), most timely research to researchers, students, lecturers and professionals, enabling them to succeed in their chosen objectives and careers.
The Taylor & Francis strategy is to be the most flexible, dynamic, technically advanced provider of reliable, value-added information and knowledge. We undertake editorial analysis of our journals to improve their relative positions in the marketplace through publishing high quality content at an affordable price relative to each market. We adapt to the rapidly changing publishing and sales environment with the aim of maximising worldwide readership for the Journal and maximising the revenue returns to our publishing partners.
Our relationships with our partners are transparent, consultative and flexible and are individual to each partner taking into account their own needs and strategies. We offer a high quality service to our partners and customers in all aspects of the business from high quality production values through to fast distribution times. We have a commitment to innovation, both in publishing for developing new subject areas with our academic partners, and as a means of constantly improving efficiency and the recognition of our journals in the international academic community.
Taylor & Francis believes that the purpose of a journal is to differentiate, authenticate and validate. We remain committed to the journal economy while taking full opportunity of the emerging demands for online information in a way that does not undermine the identity and integrity of the individual title, and in a way that enables authors to exercise their rights over their own work.
With regard to both print readership and online usage, Taylor & Francis, through its investment in comprehensive marketing and innovative sales strategies, will maximise usage and citations for each journal. In 2004 Taylor & Francis had approximately 330,000 articles available online. As part of a long-term strategy of increasing access to our extensive journal archives, Taylor & Francis has embarked on an ambitious project to digitise its journal archives, giving library users access to high quality historic research at the click of a mouse. From late 2006 there will be over 3.75 million pages made available in the following subject areas:
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Business, Management and Economics
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Chemistry
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Education
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Physics.
Further releases are planned for Psychology and Geography, Planning and Environment, in 2006, as part of a rolling plan to digitise the entire back files in every subject. In each case the deep archives will go back to Issue 1, Volume 1 of every journal in the subject area.
informaworldTM, our bespoke online delivery system that was launched in 2006 is a cross-searchable platform that provides users with the whole range of our content in digital format. New content is added to the system as it is published in print, and the platform is designed with distribution in mind, with RSS feeds and MARC records central to the design. It is the first time that we have provided the possibility for researchers to search across its large archive: over 1,000 journal titles and more than 10,000 eBooks, along with reference content and abstract and index databases.
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