Those looking for journals offering a reasonably straightforward route to compliance with the NIH Public Access mandate may want keep Springer journals in mind as a possibility. Their default copyright transfer has been altered to be (minimally) workable with the mandate. From the Springer web site:
"As of 7 April 2008, Springer has adapted its standard Copyright Transfer Statement (CTS) for new articles to ensure compliance with new guidelines from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
"An author may self-archive an author-created version of his/her article on his/her own website. He/she may also deposit this version on his/her institution's and funder's (funder-designated) repository at the funder’s requesthttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif or as a result of a legal obligation, including his/her final version, provided it is not made publicly available until after 12 months of official publication. He/she may not use the publisher's PDF version which is posted on www.springerlink.com for the purpose of self-archiving or deposit. Furthermore, the author may only post his/her version provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com"."
This policy means that authors will not have to negotiate with Springer to maintain minimal copyrights to submit to PubMed Central. Note though that the author/grantee must still push the manuscript to NIH -- Springer does not do this automatically under this policy. Note also that the release is given only to the final manuscript, not the publication-formatted article.
Alternatively, as an even more hassle-free method, NIH provides a list of journals which automatically deposit the paper in PubMedCentral within the 12 month post-pub window -- there's no further action required on the author's part following acceptance for these titles. See http://publicaccess.nih.gov/submit_process_journals.htm for details.
