As someone who as published around 45 papers, the idea that you'd have to repeat an experiment rather than reference the original work is bollocks. This is a "I had a friend whose cousin heard that" type story. The point is that the journal may have copyright on the text of the article as it is published the journal, but that is about all. They do not own the results of the experiment, and they would not want to. For a journal today, the most important number is impact factor, the average number of times a journal is cited by other articles. They spend considerable amounts of their time working out how they improve impact factor. The last thing in the world they would do is introduce any mechanism that stop researchers citing their papers. While in some cases it would breach copyright to have the pdf of your article on your web site, there is no reason no to link to the pdf on the journal website. This might restrict access in that the person wishing to view the article may need to have a subscription (usually through their university library) to access the content. But many of the journals now are either open access, or just restrict access for 6 months then make it open. I personally believe that all articles should be open access and publishable without expensive page charges, particularly to allow access to researchers in less developed countries, but making wild claims about "someone" not being able to cite your own results is only going to damage the cause.

I'm sure Cory is right that, at the moment, electronic versions entice more readers. However, that's because currently there aren't so many electronic versions of popular recent books. So if you're reading e-books, you're quite likely to find Cory's work, and perhaps start reading more of his stuff. But what happens when the market is flooded with e-books? You read your favourite authors and Cory gets nothing if you haven't already found, liked and are prepared to pay for his writing.