Sixth International Congress Research Articles

David M. Bunis, ed. Language.) and Literatures of Sephardic and Oriental Jews: Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress for Research on the Sep hard i and Oriental Heritage. Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute and Misgav Yerushalayim, 2009. Pp. 482 (in English, Spanish, French) and 434 pages (in Hebrew).Frank Alvarez- Pereyre and Jean Baumgarten, eds. Linguistique des langues juives et linguistique generale. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2003. Pp. AA7 (with two articles in English).John JVIyhill. Language in Society: Towards a New Understanding . Clevedon-Buffalo-Toronto: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2004. Pp. ix + 239.The three books here under review consist of two collections of studies in a number of and one discussion of the role of in societies. All three, especially the two collective works, make ample reference to Max Weinreich 's Geshikhtefun der y id L) her shprakh. 1 The two collective works continue the tradition of comparative treatments of that began in the 1930s.2The three volumes also contain numerous mentions of my article Jewish Interlinguistics: Facts and Conceptual Framework Language 57 [1981]: 99-149), which was inspired by Weinreich 's magnum opus. However, since 1981, I have radically altered my views on languages. In my 1981 article, I accepted Weinreich 's premise that most were connected to each other through successive acts of language shift, leading back to colloquial Hebrew, for example, Yiddish replaced Judeo-French and Judeo-Italian which in turn replaced Judeo- Latin and Judeo-Greek, the successors of the Judeo-Aramaic and Hebrew speech communities of the biblical period. It is true that there are unique (Judeo-) Romance elements in Yiddish and a handful of Judeo-Greek elements in some Judeo-Romance languages, but these facts can reflect language contact as well as substratal influences. There is also no reason to think that the presence of a community in a single location in successive historical periods automatically implies generational links between those very communities. For example, there is no evidence that Romance-speaking Jews in pre-eighth-century Spain are the ancestors of Romance-speaking Jews in Spain in the thirteenth century. A consequence of the assertion that cannot be placed on an unbroken chain of language shift leading back to old colloquial Hebrew is that the Hebrew component of cannot provide straightforward clues to the reconstruction of old colloquial Palestinian Hebrew. I also accepted Weinreich's assumption that were acts of linguistic creativity intended to support the unique religion and culture of the Jews and to replace obsolete colloquial Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic.I now believe that the importance of an unbroken chain of language shift leading back to Hebrew was grossly exaggerated, since it emerges that most were created independently of preexisiting (e.g., Judezmo [Judeo- Spanish] arose centuries after the demise of colloquial Latin, and there are doubts about the very existence of a Judeo- Latin). Moreover, my research in Yiddish and Judezmo have convinced me that they were in fact created by recent Irano-TurkoSlavic and Berber converts to Judaism, respectively. If that is the case, then the big question is whether collective studies of Jewish languages have any raison d'etre; if they do, what should the goal of such collective studies be?The use of the Biblical Hebrew term adhkenaz (Scythians) as a selfdesignation of Yiddish-speaking Jews is a dramatic clue to the largely Iranian ethnic origin of the biggest community in the world, yet the historical facts are almost universally denied. The term has in fact gone through a number of semantic changes: (a) ashkenaz = Iranian: David ben Avraham ai-Fasi, a Karaite philologist from Fez, wrote in the tenth century that Ashkenaz was the man from whom the Khazars descended, while another Karaite, Josef ben Burhan, wrote in the same century that Khazars were Ashkenazim. …

The recent Sixth International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication (September 2009) was packed with intense discussions about improving quality and credibility of biomedical publishing. Meeting every 4 years, the Congress has provided the opportunity for editors (past and present) to confer and debate on what constitutes quality publishing and how to achieve and maintain it. Not surprisingly, external peer review was one of the key topics: (1) What makes a good peer reviewer? (2) How does the quality of reviews submitted by reviewers differ over their careers? and (3) How can we train, encourage, and attract the best quality peer reviewers? Although the use of external peer reviewers is now seen as the fundamental approach for improving quality in science, it is easy to forget that many scientific journals did not use peer review until the 20th century. Unfortunately, peer review is an imperfect system, and a 2003 Cochrane Review found little empirical evidence to support editorial peer review as a means to improve biomedical publishing. Nonetheless, that Cochrane Review identified methodological problems in research on peer review and stated ‘‘that the absence of evidence on efficacy and effectiveness cannot be interpreted as evidence of their absence.’’ However, high-quality peer review does seem to have value in advancing biomedical publishing and our suggestion of the characteristics of that ideal peer reviewer (to provide this high-quality peer review) is shown in Table 1. In essence, the high-quality peer reviewer is a colleague who makes a major contribution to the quality of the scientific literature by having been involved in the peer-review process. The importance of this contribution cannot be understated and that gets to the core of assuring adequate recognition of these colleagues for their valuable contributions. Authors making contributions to the biomedical literature automatically have something substantive to show for their time and expertise (author names appear under the title of the article and are listed by the major indexing services, such as Medline [PubMed]). In contrast, peer reviewers, by and large, are anonymous with no tangible evidence of their contributions. This lack of tangible recognition impairs the ability of journal editors to entice reviewers. This is particularly problematic in the biomedical sciences where productivity measures are now increasingly tied to salary, rank, and tenure. Likely there are some internal motivations to be a peer reviewer including helping to advance their field, staying up to date, and educating oneself by learning what other reviewers reading the same paper thought of it (assuming editors share the reviews), which helps in getting people to agree to review, but it does not recognize the contributions to the biomedical literature. However, volunteering time to provide peer review that is not recognized as scholarly achievement and thus would reduce time devoted to other measurable productivity standards will generally be discouraged in academic environments. This makes it difficult for journal editors to obtain peer reviews of submitted materials. For example, for the Journal of Child Neurology, as the number of noneditorial submissions has increased from approximately 270 in 2005 to more than 370 in 2009, the ability to obtain more than 1 completed peer review per submission has decreased over that same time period from nearly 25% to less than 5%. This highlights a crisis that threatens to undermine the quality of biomedical publications and the urgency of finding a solution that will permit peer reviewing to be considered by the scientific community as a recognized valuable scholarly contribution. How can journals acknowledge high-quality peer reviewers in a way that will be tangible as scholarly achievement that the academic community will be willing to recognize? Some of the current mechanisms used to recognize the contributions of peer reviewers include publishing reviewer names periodically, providing continued medical education (CME) credits, offering discounts for journal subscriptions, or providing

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