In practice though any repositories that I looked at are so lame I wouldn’t want to be associated with them. If an article repositories took the responsibility to only include high quality articles – my guess is that in practice that would mean they need to be topical (in order to judge quality) I don’t see anything wrong with participating. I don’t know if any do that though. But if they are just collections of tons of not very worthwhile link generators they just seem like a way to try and trick the search engines which I don’t think is a good way to spend your time.

You can always publish some articles on your site and provide an partially open license to republish them in their entirety…