Yes. Taylor & Francis Group is a long-established academic publisher whose journals require peer review, and its overall legitimacy as a publisher is not seriously contested — it is not on any recognized predatory-publisher list and is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). That said, Taylor & Francis publishes more than 2,700 journals across almost every academic discipline, spanning long-standing subscription titles, newer open-access journals, and acquired open-access imprints. A portfolio that large does not have uniform editorial rigor from title to title, and it has real, documented episodes worth knowing about — most notably a 2017 hoax-paper acceptance in one of its open-access journals and a pre-acquisition editorial-standards lapse at an imprint it later bought. Neither amounts to Taylor & Francis being predatory; both are legitimate reasons to evaluate a specific journal on its own merits rather than assume that “published by Taylor & Francis” settles the question by itself.
What Taylor & Francis Is
Taylor & Francis traces its roots to 1798, when Richard Taylor founded the company that launched the Philosophical Magazine; the firm took its current name in 1852 after William Francis joined as a partner. Today Taylor & Francis Group is the academic publishing division of Informa plc (a merger completed in 2004) and is one of the largest academic publishers globally, alongside Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and SAGE. It publishes more than 2,700 peer-reviewed journals plus academic books under several imprints, including Routledge, and is a member of COPE, which sets shared standards for handling research-integrity issues such as authorship disputes, plagiarism, and image manipulation.
How Taylor & Francis’s Peer Review Process Works
Taylor & Francis states that single-anonymized (“single-blind”) peer review is its default model — the reviewer’s identity is withheld from the author, while the author’s identity is visible to the reviewer — though the specific model varies by journal, and some titles offer or require double-anonymized or open peer review instead. As with most peer-reviewed journals, an external academic editor or handling editor, not publisher staff, makes the accept/revise/reject decision after weighing independent reviewer reports. For the underlying vocabulary this page uses — what “single-anonymized” review means and how it differs from double-anonymized or open review — see CASRAI’s single-anonymized peer review entry and the ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023 peer review terminology standard that formalized these terms. This is the same basic structure used across the major commercial and society publishers; see CASRAI’s Elsevier peer review guide and the AI in peer review: publisher policy comparison for how specific editorial policies compare across Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis.
Portfolio Quality Variance: Why the Answer Isn’t the Same for Every Taylor & Francis Journal
A publisher with 2,700-plus journals is, by construction, not a single editorial operation with one uniform quality bar — it is thousands of independent editorial boards operating under a shared publisher’s infrastructure and policies. Taylor & Francis’s portfolio ranges from long-established, highly selective disciplinary journals to newer open-access journals and acquired open-access imprints with different histories and different track records. Two of those open-access imprints in particular — Cogent OA (a set of multidisciplinary open-access journals) and Dove Medical Press (a medical open-access publisher Taylor & Francis acquired in 2017) — have documented episodes worth knowing about, described accurately below. This is the same structural reality documented on CASRAI’s Is MDPI Peer Reviewed? page for a different large publisher: scale itself creates variance, and variance is not the same thing as a predatory-publisher finding.
The Cogent Social Sciences Hoax (2017)
In 2017, philosopher Peter Boghossian and mathematician James Lindsay pseudonymously submitted a deliberately nonsensical hoax paper, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” to Cogent Social Sciences, one of the Cogent OA multidisciplinary open-access journals Taylor & Francis operates. The paper was accepted and published; the authors then revealed the hoax publicly, and the journal retracted the article once its true nature was established. This episode is a documented precursor to the broader 2018 “Grievance studies affair” (also called the “Sokal squared” hoax), in which the same authors and a third collaborator, Helen Pluckrose, submitted a larger set of hoax papers across multiple publishers to probe peer review standards in a specific cluster of academic fields. The Cogent Social Sciences case is real, well documented, and specific to one journal within one open-access imprint — it is not evidence about Taylor & Francis’s subscription journals or its portfolio as a whole, but it is a legitimate data point when evaluating that particular journal’s editorial rigor.
Dove Medical Press and the 2013 Bohannon Sting (a Pre-Acquisition Legacy Issue)
In 2013, science journalist John Bohannon submitted a deliberately flawed fake study to 304 open-access journals as an editorial-standards test published in Science; roughly 60% of the journals that completed review accepted the paper, including Drug Design, Development and Therapy, published by the independent open-access publisher Dove Medical Press. The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) terminated Dove’s membership in November 2013 as a result. Dove worked with OASPA on its editorial processes and was reinstated as an OASPA member in September 2015. Taylor & Francis acquired Dove Medical Press in September 2017 — roughly four years after the Bohannon episode and two years after Dove’s OASPA reinstatement. This sequencing matters: the documented lapse happened under independent ownership, before Taylor & Francis owned the imprint, not as an event within a Taylor & Francis-run editorial process. It remains a legitimate reason to look carefully at any Dove Medical Press journal’s current editorial board and indexing status rather than either dismissing or overstating the imprint’s history.
Is Taylor & Francis a Predatory Publisher?
No, not by the definitions used across the field. See CASRAI’s predatory journal entry: a predatory journal is characterized by the absence of genuine peer review behind a fee-based business model, typically combined with deceptive claims about editorial boards, indexing, or fees. Taylor & Francis does not meet that definition — it is not on Beall’s list or its successor resources, its journals undergo genuine editorial and peer review, and it is a COPE member, which involves an ongoing compliance relationship. The documented episodes above are journal- and imprint-specific editorial-quality lapses within a very large portfolio, not evidence that Taylor & Francis operates without real peer review. The appropriate response to a portfolio this size is the same one that applies to any large publisher: evaluate the specific journal you are considering, not the publisher’s name alone.
Common Confusion: Did Taylor & Francis Acquire Hindawi?
No. This is a frequent point of confusion because Hindawi’s 2023-2024 mass-retraction crisis is often mentioned in the same breath as other large-publisher open-access controversies, but the companies are unrelated on this point. Wiley, not Taylor & Francis, acquired Hindawi in 2021. Wiley subsequently discovered large-scale paper-mill infiltration across Hindawi’s journals, retracted more than 8,000 articles in 2023 alone (over 11,000 total), and discontinued the Hindawi brand entirely by 2024, folding its remaining journals into Wiley’s own portfolio. Taylor & Francis was not involved in the Hindawi acquisition or the retraction crisis that followed it.
How to Verify Peer Review for a Specific Taylor & Francis Journal
Because the honest answer depends on the individual journal, not the publisher, check these directly before relying on a specific Taylor & Francis title:
- The journal’s own “Aims & Scope” or “Instructions for Authors” page on Taylor & Francis Online (tandfonline.com) — it should state the peer review model used (single-anonymized, double-anonymized, or open) and describe the editorial process.
- Indexing status in Web of Science, Scopus, or a subject-specific database — consistent, current indexing is a signal that a journal has passed an external quality evaluation, though indexing decisions and predatory-publisher status are separate questions (see CASRAI’s Is MDPI Peer Reviewed? guide for how a Web of Science delisting differs from a predatory finding).
- The editorial board — genuine editors and reviewers should be identifiable, affiliated researchers in the journal’s actual subject area.
- DOAJ listing, for open-access Taylor & Francis journals — the Directory of Open Access Journals applies its own vetting criteria independent of the publisher.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Taylor & Francis a legitimate publisher?
Yes. Taylor & Francis is one of the largest academic publishers in the world, part of Informa plc, a COPE member, and not listed on any recognized predatory-publisher resource. Its overall legitimacy is not a genuinely contested question in the way some newer open-access publishers’ status has been.
Does Taylor & Francis use single-blind or double-blind peer review?
Single-anonymized (single-blind) review is Taylor & Francis’s stated default, but the exact model varies by journal — some titles use double-anonymized review, and a smaller number offer open peer review. Check the specific journal’s author guidelines to confirm.
Are all Taylor & Francis journals equally rigorous?
No. With more than 2,700 journals spanning long-established disciplinary titles and newer or acquired open-access imprints, editorial rigor and selectivity vary across the portfolio, the same way it does across any publisher operating at that scale. Evaluate the specific journal, not the publisher name alone.
Did Taylor & Francis acquire Hindawi?
No. Wiley acquired Hindawi in 2021 and discontinued the brand by 2024 after a large paper-mill-driven retraction crisis. Taylor & Francis was not involved.
What is Cogent OA, and is it part of Taylor & Francis?
Cogent OA is a set of multidisciplinary open-access journals operated by Taylor & Francis. One of its journals, Cogent Social Sciences, published and later retracted a 2017 hoax paper, a documented but journal-specific episode.
Is Dove Medical Press part of Taylor & Francis?
Yes, since Taylor & Francis acquired the open-access medical publisher in September 2017. An editorial-standards lapse tied to a 2013 hoax-paper study predates that acquisition by roughly four years and occurred under Dove’s prior independent ownership.
