Taylor & Francis Reviews Its Open-Access Price Once a Year, Against Four Named Factors

Taylor & Francis is the most explicit of the five about how its journal APC is actually set, even without publishing the number itself on its general policy page. The list price is “reviewed at least annually” and varies according to four named factors: comparable journal rates, community impact, typical funding available in the field, and the journal’s own running costs — alongside, the page adds, maintaining the journal’s standing.

The actual figure for a given journal sits in a title-list spreadsheet, separate from the policy page, so checking the specific title is still the only way to get a number to budget with.

Book charges are where Taylor & Francis does publish figures. Standard Book Publishing Charges “start from £1,380 for an individual chapter and from £11,000 for a full monograph, plus applicable taxes”, reviewed on the same annual basis and varying by text type, word count, discipline and funder demographics — a textbook, the policy notes, typically costs more than a research monograph, and a shorter book typically costs less.

Discounts differ by product. Book charges carry a stated discount of up to 75% for funders based in low or lower-middle income economies, plus member-scheme coverage and the option of retrospective open access for an already-published chapter or book. Journal APCs are addressed separately, through library-consortium arrangements such as the EIFL programme, which offers a 50% discount or a full waiver, depending on country, applied with a discount code at the point of submission.

Naming the review factors is a different kind of transparency from publishing a number: it tells an author why a price might move year to year without obliging the publisher to defend any single figure in public. For a portfolio spanning humanities, social science and STM journals with very different funding norms, that is a workable middle ground between a single public price and total silence.

Publishing real figures for books but not journals likely reflects how differently the two are priced: a relatively small, fairly uniform set of book-charge tiers can be stated as a floor; several thousand journal APCs, each reviewed against field-specific funding norms, cannot be compressed into one honest number.

The library-consortium discount mechanism (EIFL) works at a different level from Wiley’s or Elsevier’s country lists: it is negotiated between the publisher and a specific library consortium, which is why the eligible-country list and the discount code are maintained on the consortium’s own page rather than on Taylor & Francis’s general pricing policy.

How it reaches a specific journal. Open Select (hybrid) journals, Dove Medical Press titles and society-owned journals whose society has not approved the discount are named exclusions from the EIFL consortium programme, so checking a specific journal’s eligibility before relying on a discount code matters as much as checking its price.

The consortium discount applies to a first submission only, not to a revision, and is applied after acceptance rather than guaranteed at the point a discount code is entered — a sequencing detail worth knowing before you assume the reduced figure is locked in.