[Foundation-l] Wikisource as a repository for thesis

Delirium delirium at hackish.org
Fri Oct 15 20:51:17 UTC 2004


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




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