Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
In this case I would tend to interpret the
submission of the thesis
to the appropriate university authorities as a form of prior
publication.
Agreed. This is a nice "bright line" rule that won't get us into
endless debates with physics cranks. We can still omit, for example,
self-published books.
Hopefully it won't come up much, but it's actually very hard these
days to determine what a "real" publisher is. There's a *lot* of even
widely-distributed books that are put out by fairly small publishers
and then distributed through a larger network, almost in the same way
that self-published books are. To use this example, most university
publishers are essentially vanity presses---apart from the big ones
like MIT Press and Oxford University Press, the rest are simply
imprints that, if they're published at all, are done on a
pay-to-publish basis.
I'm counting upon this being an infrequent occurence. The bulk of
things being put into Wikisource are Public Domain documents. With more
recent things we often need more discussion on copyright issues. Of
course the cranks are only too willing to license their material because
they want all the exposure they can get, and in the context of such
questions there is an opportunity to squeeze out the self-published. If
a few get through because a university press has acted as a vanity
publisher, I don't think it will ever be enough to worry much about.
Ec