Apparently, it isn't easy being green. I agree that university repositories are an annoying waste of time. My university is starting to try to pressure us to us it. But my personal website has all my papers (sometimes with slightly illegal versions)  and many are on arXiv. Who can be bothered updating so many sites? It would seem much better to pressure the publishers and in particular the faculty who support bloodsucking toll access publishers, and get real open access now, not in 50 years.

This sentence was telling: "But with little actual means of enforcement, compliance is difficult to measure and appears spotty at best." If they really wanted to enfoce, it could be done. Eg: no sabbatical, annual performance review or internal grant application counts papers not in the repository.

At UC Riverside they just started trying to coax professors to put their papers on the repository this year.  I did it - it took half an hour for over 80 papers, no big deal.  But for most professors, as the article says, "They don’t know about it, they don’t really care about it."  It was announced in an email, but that's not enough. 

I'm optimistic that in the long run this will be a good thing.  It'll take a bit more work than simply setting up the website and sending out an email about it.

The same story here. My university runs its own repository, which is barely used, except for theses. The one plus is that the project is piggy-backed with an OJS installation that hosts the Journal of Computational Geometry, among other journals.

France has a national repository, HaL, that can host university repositories as subcollections. And the very good thing is that it permits to post directly to the arXiv. My papers are all on HaL, which is my arXiv submission hub for many years now.

The University of California would be better off financing arXiv and biorxiv.

Well, except that they want it to apply to all disciplines, not just the ones covered by arxiv etc.

+David Wood Yes, it surprises me how few institutions are formally supporting arXiv. It took ages for me to find the list: https://confluence.cornell.edu/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=241664021

UC campuses are indeed there. But perhaps they should give more - the amounts of money are small.

+David Wood - they should do that too, but those archives only deal with a few academic specialities.  What we really need are similar archives in more subjects.  And we need these archives not merely to exist, but to be widely adopted.  I've tried to get some people in the humanities to do this, but they don't seem at all convinced.  At least the UC Digital Library covers all subjects.

+John Baez The relative success of HaL is based one several points:
* it is interfaced with arXiv (and I hope it is or will be interfaced with other thematic international repositories such as biorXiv),
* it is made more and more mandatory (for evaluation purposes: math department use it to establish lists of publications and thus demand their members to fill it),
* it is interdisciplinary, available for all researchers in France,
* it enables universities to build specific repositories inside it, so that they can show off with their own repository without asking researcher to deposit several times.

The weakest point is that the demands from departments are often restricted to bibliographic notices, instead of full texts. It would be better for a national repository to only accept notices together with a full text, up to enabling a privacy option with a delay to be set up on deposit (or weekly e-mail reminders telling that the researcher should set up a delay) and making the infinite delay possible but uncomfortable to set.