Taylor & Francis

Academic Publisher

174years oldFounded 1852

The academic publishing giant sold Microsoft access to its scholarly content in a $10 million AI deal in 2024 — without consulting the researchers who wrote it — becoming the bellwether for AI licensing of academic research and the backlash it provokes.

Company Organization

Wikipedia

Why this score

How the formula works →

+3.4proUses AI in their work
+3.4proLicenses their data for AI training
+1.2pro2 pro-AI statements (measured)

Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score: Strongly Pro-AI · 8.0/10

In their words

This new initiative, which we will be working on hand-in-hand with our regional publishing partners, is a very positive use of AI technology. It promises to promote better understanding between cultures and accelerate awareness of the knowledge required to meet today’s challenges, regardless of where it is first published.

— Jeremy North, Taylor & Francis statement, 2025

The bulk sale of data to big tech to train AI that has as-yet unknown reach & applications sets a new and worrying precedent.

— Ruth Alison Clemens, Inside Higher Ed, 2024

I was shocked, not that it had happened, but that no one had said anything to us at all.

— Lauren Barbeau, Inside Higher Ed, 2024

Biography

Taylor & Francis, the British academic publisher whose roots reach back to 1798 and whose imprints include Routledge and CRC Press, publishes thousands of scholarly journals and books a year. Its parent company Informa disclosed in May 2024 a roughly $10 million agreement giving Microsoft non-exclusive access to its “advanced learning content and data” to improve AI systems — one of the first big AI licensing deals in academic publishing.

Sold without asking

The trouble was who wasn’t asked. Academic authors learned of the deal from the news months later, and reported they were given no notice, no opt-out, and no additional payment. Leiden University researcher Ruth Alison Clemens warned the bulk data sale set “a new and worrying precedent”; Georgia Tech’s Lauren Barbeau was shocked that “no one had said anything to us at all.” The Society of Authors objected to publishers signing tech deals without consulting creators, and some academics moved to pull their work from Taylor & Francis journals. The publisher countered that the partnership would help develop tools to “improve research” and that authors’ royalty arrangements covered such subsidiary uses.

The deal became the reference case for a wider wave: Wiley, Sage, and others soon disclosed their own AI licensing arrangements, and Informa deepened its Microsoft partnership in subsequent years. Defenders — including open-access advocates like SPARC’s Heather Joseph, who called training AI on high-quality scholarship “an unqualified good thing” — argue the alternative is models trained on worse information.

Selling training data was only half of it. In March 2025, after a year of testing AI translation tools against human translators, the publisher announced it would use them to bring books under its CRC Press and Routledge imprints to English-language readers — with human copyediting and author review on every manuscript. Books Managing Director Jeremy North called it “a very positive use of AI technology,” and the company maintains a public page on how AI is used across its publishing process.

Taylor & Francis thus sits oddly on the pro side of the ledger: enthusiastic about AI’s value for research and for its balance sheet, while embodying the consent problem that fuels the other side of the debate.