TITLE: Submitting to arXiv when unaffiliated
QUESTION [40 upvotes]: 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.

REPLY [5 votes]: 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.