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.
If you google a bit this comes up a lot because book reviewers who have a "no self-published books" policy to cut down on the cruft they have to sift through are finding it increasingly hard to actually define what they mean by that policy...
-Mark