IEEE Refuses to Accept Public-Domain Papers?
It's obvious that IEEE wouldn't accept such papers.  Like any publisher, its business model is based on ownership of copyright.  So this is a bit of a tempest in a teacup.<p>Instead, let me offer a more interesting factoid: to the best of my knowledge, in the United States, and probably in certain other countries, there is no such concept as a private individual dedicating a publication to the public domain.<p>Documents fall in public domain when the owners' copyrights have expired.  For the federal government, the expiration is immediate.  For everyone else, there is no legal mechanism for hastening a document's copyright expiration.  [This is why it's foolish to "put software in the public domain".  You haven't actually done anything at all.]