Competing Requirements for Self-archiving

Stevan Harnad wrote a response blog to a letter to the editor that appeared in D-Lib Magazine. The original letter to the editor was a hypothetical dialog between an author whose work was recently accepted and an open-access consultant. In the dialog, the author is unsure about how to deal with a funder who requires the article to be deposited in an online repository and a publisher who may or may not allow the article to be deposited in a location they have no control over. In his post, Harnad takes excerpt from the dialog and writes more information about what the open-access consultant is saying, sometimes correcting him.
First, Harnad clarifies the opt-out clauses in self-archiving mandates. The opt-out clause is about whether or not you need to persuade the journal to accept your addendum thereby formalizing your right to deposit your article. While this is worthwhile, it is not essential so authors can choose to opt-out if they cannot persuade the journal or they simply don't wish to try. But regardless of the presence of an opt-out clause, authors still deposit their articles immediately. It is not necessary to find another publisher if the publisher denies your request.
Second, if the publisher has an embargo period, and the author wishes to honor it, they simply deposit the article as closed access for the appropriate period of time. There is no need to talk to the publisher about the embargo period.
Harnad suggests that depositing an article is not as confusing as it seems. An author simply needs to deposit all drafts as soon as an article is accepted for publication. According to his post, 63% of the top journals allow such a deposit. If your journal is one of the other 37%, simply set the article to closed access.
The issues surrounding depositing a published article are complex and probably result in many authors choosing to do nothing rather than try to navigate through all the competing requirements. Though closed access is not ideal, having a copy in a repository is better than not having anything stored. It seems that the more an author knows about the process of depositing an article and what they are allowed to do, the more likely it is that they will go to the trouble of depositing their article. The way things currently stand, most authors choose not to mess with online repositories because they don't even know where to find out what they are allowed to do.