Comment on the ICMJE 2025 editorial on guidance related to predatory publishing

The 2025 editorial by the ICMJE on predatory publishing falls short of providing robust and clear guidance to its readership. It also does not offer a thorough appreciation of why there are insufficient safety-guards to protect different stakeholders against predatory behavior in academic publishing. That ICMJE editorial failed to offer proper recognition to a rich literature on this topic, with 736 results according to Scopus. The ICMJE also did not offer proper recognition to Jeffrey Beall, the de facto originator of the concept of “predatory publishing”. The ICMJE editorial recommends listening to the advice of librarians, seemingly unaware that some librarians are offering misinformation about “predatory publishing”. Finally, the references supporting the editorial are relatively old, the most recent from 2021 (one article), with the others ranging from 2015-2019.