Restricting online access

"Some publishers fear that my posting pdfs of my published work on this website will jeopardize their sales I’ve become so used to journals in particular allowing me to post copies of my work here that I am now brought up short in shock when publishers refuse to allow it. Unfortunately this has happened a couple of times in the past few weeks, so I thought I’d blog about it....Noteworthy, too, is the lack of evidence for their assertion that the mounting of my work on my website will affect sales. If there were really such ‘general agreement’ (Brepols), that ‘posting chapters online can have a very real and negative effect on the market for the book’ (OUP, NY) it would not be the case that other academic presses, notably Cambridge University Press, are so very relaxed about allowing me to post my journal articles (for example, this) and book chapters (for example, this and this) on my website....Other ironies here are rife. OUP is my own university’s press — technically a department of my home University, for all that it’s a large commercial enterprise. It surely exists at least in part to publish the work of Oxford academics, yet it is refusing to allow me to post my own work on my own website, simply because it has been typeset. For an academic at a public Higher Education establishment where research is paid by the public purse, it seems odd that my wish to make my research available to the wider public (although very few of them will interested!) is stymied by a (US) branch of my own publicly funded institution...."