I don't know enough about the relevant case law to tell you for certain that the layout is copyrightable, but my gut feeling is that it is, since that bar is pr

I don't know enough about the relevant case law to tell you for certain that the layout is copyrightable, but my gut feeling is that it is, since that bar is pretty low and copying the publisher's PDF seems kind of analogous to copying a website's HTML. Fair use may not be applicable here, since even though the layout is a small proportion of the total work, it has value independent of the text: People might spend money (or persuade their university to spend money) to buy the publisher's PDF even if the manuscript were available for free. Given your link I agree that the review process is unlikely to give the publisher any claim to the text itself. I do know that most author agreements for non-open access journals allow authors to publish the manuscript on their personal website and in repositories (sometimes pre-review, sometimes post-review), but most do not allow authors to publish the publisher's PDF, which suggests that the publishers believe they have some kind of ownership over the latter. (In practice many people post the publisher's PDF articles on their websites and no one complains, although repositories like PubMed Central contain only manuscripts from these journals.) The AAAS author agreement actually explicitly allows authors to legally publish the peer reviewed manuscript on their websites as soon as it is published, which raises the question of why the authors of these studies didn't just do that.