Just curious: if your university copyrights all the papers you submit to them digitally, but you put them in the public domain first before submitting your work, what happens? Is it copyrighted, or in the public domain?
I'm not a lawyer, much less your lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Nonetheless, this sounds like a bad idea.
I think from the law's perspective, it would be in the public domain, but there could be a contract breach with the university if, by submitting, you represent that you hold an exclusive copyright interest in the work. Obviously you can't transfer rights you don't already own.
From an academic perspective, it's self-plagiarism, a form of academic misconduct. Submitting work that you've already published is disallowed, although this is more frequently applied to students trying to submit the same paper from a previous class or something they published in a journal.
