HAL

I had to put up with their useless forms, the French, and a long wait to get this:

Dear hal user, we do not question the scientific content of your paper but for a first submission on HAL it is preferable to submit a paper already published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in order to establish a confidence contract between you and HAL. All article in their early stage and “to be published” can not constitute a first submission to Hal. We refuse your submision [sic]. Thank you for your understanding.

Now I am supposed to put up with more pain just to post an already published paper, so that a “confidence contract” can be established, so that I can finally have the other paper on the system so that I can submit to theoretiCS without the vexing process of getting my latex (which I don’t use directly) to compile on arxiv.

My solution would be to get rid of all this nonsense, and make submissions as easy as possible for authors. Simply post the submission .pdf on a website, if you must have this online during evaluation. I hope one day to run a journal like that.