Submitting to arXiv when unaffiliated I am writing a short paper in the area of combinatorics.
When the paper is complete, I would like to be able to submit it to arXiv.
The reasons that I would like to submit to arXiv are:


*

*To obtain a date and time stamp from a central authority so that I can prove the work is mine.

*To promote access to the paper under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license


Although I have created an account on arXiv, because I am not affiliated to any academic institution, it appears that it might be difficult to get the paper accepted by arXiv.
For example see,
arxiv.org/help/submit

The following information is also required for submission:
Institutional affiliation for the
  author(s) must be provided. Official
  report number(s) from the author(s)
  institution(s) must be provided.

Also the following blog article does not appear encouraging:
Does The Arxiv Blacklist Authors ?
Does anyone on mathoverflow have any advice on how to submit to arXiv (or a similar database) without an academic affiliation?
Thanks in advance for any advice.
 A: Normally you need an endorser for arXiv.org but that is not always necessary or sufficient. Try writing to the administrators if you are stuck. If all else fails and you need it archived with a datestamp use viXra.org which was set up for exactly this purpose.
A: Official Report Number tends to stand for internal numbers assigned by the University or Research Institution for Technical Reports.  For example, ATT Bell Labs often published their internal research documents as Technical Reports, and the Computer Science department at M.I.T. also tends to publish internal research findings, often supported by government sources or sponsored-research funded by corportations, as "white papers" or technical reports.
MIT's library is pretty good at finding these things: http://libguides.mit.edu/techreports, and their webpage defines technical reports as
What is a technical report?
Technical reports:

*

*Are written to convey new developments or final results of scientific and technical research.

*Are usually funded by government departments or corporate bodies.

*Deliver technical information to the funding organization.

*Provide a forum for peer information exchange.

*Are not easy to find


Also, a lot of research funded by the military or DARPA or the OSD in the United States has a Final Report as its ultimate end-result and the means of disseminating the findings and recommendations, rather than a peer-reviewed journal article.
It is a shame that have an educational e-mail address for affiliation gets you a bye for submitting to arxiv; perhaps even academics should need an endorsement prior to being allowed to commit an article to arxiv.  The seed recommenders would have to have been planted earlier, anyway.
A: For your first goal (authoritative time stamp), check out this site.  Although it may not be well known, it maintains a good audit trail and should be pretty hard to contest.  It could also be useful for stamping work in progress, even if you are not ready to make it public.
A: I think you need to be endorsed first.  See this link:  http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement
A: It seems to be possible to submit a paper without being its author. If I remember it right, on the second page of the submission form, you have a question "Are you an author of the paper?" and "No" is an acceptable answer. So, you may just find somebody who is a "registered author" (this is just a technical term describing a person's relationship to the arXiv, not his relationship to the paper being submitted) and ask him to do the submission for you (of course, he'll want to look at what he's going to submit first but the authorship will remain exclusively yours though his name will appear in the "submitted by" field). 
I agree that this "academic affiliation" thing is somewhat annoying but it is, probably, some sort of a safeguard against completely random people posting some total junk on arXiv. I guess it can be overridden by the arXiv administrators on a case by case basis but my guess would also be that to do this, they should be first convinced that what you are going to post is a high quality stuff. So, before writing to them, it would be nice to have a few papers published somewhere and a few known people to certify that you aren't just one more crank, which creates some sort of catch 22 in your situation.  
A: 
Official report number(s) from the author(s) institution(s) must be provided.

I have absolutely no idea what that phrase means. I have a few papers on the arXiv and have never knowingly provided that information.  With the proviso that I'm not privy to the internal workings of the arXiv, I would recommend just trying to submit and seeing what it tells you to do - I deem it highly unlikely that you'll get a message saying "You have no affiliation, never darken our doors again!" but more likely "We notice that you have not provided an academic affiliation; therefore, in order for your article to be properly submitted, you need to do X, Y, and Z.".
There are, of course, other ways of getting timestamps and of making your work public.  If you want to know whether or not it is of sufficient quality to be worth publishing, you should track down someone in the field who you could ask for an opinion.
(But if you do that, don't just send them the manuscript with a brief note saying "Please give me your opinion on the attached."!  Write a specific letter to that person, preferably with a fair amount of flattery - don't overdo it - and ask a specific question.  If you want to know "Has this been done before", you could ask that here, I think, but if you want to know "Is this decent quality work", then you should not ask it here.)
