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I am a hobbyist mathematician in China. I study maths by myself and make some course videos to teach commutative algebra, functional analysis and other topics on the internet, like the Khan Academy and MIT open courses.

Now I need a .edu email to get into some sites such as ResearchGate and arxiv. Is there any organisation that will help me like this: I show them some material, such as videos and papers, and if they think I am no weaker than some college teachers at least, they would give me a .edu email?

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    Google is your friend. – Chris Gregg Jun 3 '13 at 9:49
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    For arXiv, you certainly do not need an e-mail address affiliated to a university. You just need to have endorsements. Getting an academic to endorse your paper is likely a lesser threshold than what you tried to describe (obtaining an affiliation to get an academic e-mail address). – Willie Wong Jun 3 '13 at 10:48
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    BTW, as mentioned in the arXiv link I just gave, having an academic affiliation is not a sufficient condition for gaining automatic endorsements. That is to say, a .edu address gained from the methods linked to by @ChrisGregg may very well be useless for the OP's intended use. – Willie Wong Jun 3 '13 at 10:53
  • Thanks, but I want to find some specific places with their short introductions. – Strongart Jun 7 '13 at 7:04
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    @EnthusiasticStudent this is not a question about a website. Please consider tags carefully before retagging. And 'organisation' is not a mistake; it's just British vs American spelling. – ff524♦ Sep 16 '14 at 8:59
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Of course, becoming a student or staff member is one way to get a university email. Some institutions provide alumni email.

Many universities have various unpaid affiliates. Such affiliates are sometimes eligible for a university email. However, such affiliates are often expected to contribute to the school, faculty, or university. For example, you might publish with the university as your affiliation or you might give occasional lectures or you might supervise a research student. These sorts of affiliations are typically obtained by building up a relationship with some academics in a given department and making enquiries.

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  • Could you please describe more about such unpaid affiliates? Probably, appropriate keywords for searching for them. I've never seen such things on the official pages of departments or universities, and wish to learn more about it. – Googlebot Jun 3 '13 at 10:07
  • @All One example is a visiting position. Also, if you have your own postdoc fellowship from your government etc., you can be an unpaid postdoc at university unless you teach a course. These may not be what Jeromy had in mind though. – Yuichiro Fujiwara Jun 3 '13 at 10:34
  • I imagine it would be a fairly idiosyncratic process. I'd just start by sending an email to academics with whom you have an existing relationship and who value your research. – Jeromy Anglim Jun 4 '13 at 8:14
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As a researcher whose is that of a very small university in Europe, whose domain name and institutional email addresses do not end in .edu (nor in .ac.uk or any other recognizable pattern): any website that uses email domains as filters has a fallback mechanism (or exception handler) that you can reach if your own email address doesn't fit into the patterns they recognize. It may take some explaining, though…

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    Actually, I think the OP is asking for getting an e-mail at any academic institution, not necessarily that with .edu ending. At least, certainly both arXiv and ResearchGate maintain their own internal list of recognized academic domains, which includes much more than just simple filtering by TLD. – Willie Wong Jun 3 '13 at 10:51

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