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.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.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.]