(I posted this a few days ago but it never showed up. Ken, easy on the trigger finger with that spam filter!) ossguy, Thanks for the comments.
steelgraham, Stevan Harnad 1 is of course the authority on author archiving. OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) 2 and the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) 3 also have lists of repositories.
Steve, thanks again for the introduction. I hope this post will be circulated among participants in the upcoming Joburg meeting for their consideration. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend, but consider this an open offer to draft any language that would be useful.
On the topic of conferences: Conference papers and presentations are definitely a valuable type of nonjournal content (along with e.g. working papers, theses, dissertations).
For conference organizers: The Public Knowledge Project develops companion software to its Open Journal Systems 4 , named appropriately Open Conference Systems 5 , which conferences can use to manage submissions, make papers publicly available, apply Creative Commons 6 licenses, provide metadata compliant with the Open Archives Initiativ 7e, etc.
If you're not using OCS, you should still ask (maybe even require) permission from presenters to post their paper for gratis access and under the terms of a libre license. You don't need the presenter's copyright: If they agree to a CC license, you've got all you need.
For conference presenters: Seek to retain at least enough rights to post the paper online and apply a CC license. Science Common's Scholars Copyright 8 (including the SPARC Author Addendum 9 , here called “Access – Reuse”) will be useful here, but obviously you'll want to change the terms from “journal” to “conference”, etc. I don't know of boilerplate addenda for conferences specifically. OwnTerms, via Siva Vaidhyanathan, has a Speaker Agreement 10 which may be of use.
As long as you have the rights, you can archive your own paper, even if the conference doesn't. Preferably, archive your paper in your institutional repository and/or a relevant subject repository; at worst, you can archive on your own Web site or the Internet Archive 11.
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