Is the journal "The Winnower" scientifically trustworthy?

Question

The Winnower is a journal that offers a post-publication peer review, meaning that reviews of people can be written after online publication. There is no classical peer-review by a scientific committee prior to publication. If there are reviews to an article posted, we cannot know whether it is a "normal" person with no scientific background or a prof. Only upvotes and downvotes can be made.

After a long search in Google Scholar I found articles in this journal that were cited by other authors.

Is this journal trustworthy?

Answer 1

"Scientifically Trustworthy" is not something with a fixed meaning. But lets break down some things that it could mean:

• Is this as good as a peer-reviewed journal?: If you believe in pre-publication peer review, the answer to this is clearly "No". The Winnower is an experiment, a philosophical stance, an an extreme exercise in transparency in the publishing of scholarly material.
• Does it have the reputation of a good journal in X field: Again, probably not. I do know some people who have considered fairly extreme principled stands in favor of the same things The Winnower supports - open science and post-pub peer review, who look on it favorably, but I very much doubt it carries much weight in most fields - at least the ones I'm familiar with.
• Does it count as a publication?: Maybe. This will very much depend on whose reading your CV, etc.
• Is it predatory?: With it being free to post things, and a DOI being relatively cheap, I think it's hard to argue that The Winnower falls in the category of a predatory journal.

But mostly, I think the question betrays a misunderstanding of what The Winnower wants. The whole stance behind the site is that you shouldn't "trust" a journal because it's The Journal of Whatever. You should interrogate what's published there yourself, and the back and forth between reader and author should be made public.