7.5.3.2 Other "print equivalent" publications 

Many sources other than scientific publishers are generally deemed to provide reliable publication dates. These include for example publishers of newspapers or periodicals or television or radio stations. Academic institutions (such as academic societies or universities), international organisations (such as the European Space Agency ESA), public organisations (such as ministries or public research agencies) or standardisation bodies also typically fall into this category.

Some universities host what are known as "eprint archives" to which authors submit reports on research results in electronic form before they are submitted or accepted for publication by a conference or journal. In fact, some of these reports are never published anywhere else. The most well-known archive of this kind is arXiv.org (arxiv.org, hosted by the Cornell University Library), but there are several others, e.g. the Cryptology eprint archive (eprint.iacr.org, hosted by the International Association for Cryptology Research). Some of these archives crawl the internet to automatically retrieve publications which are publicly available from researchers' web pages, such as CiteseerX (citeseerx.ist.psu.edu, hosted by Pennsylvania State University).

Companies, organisations or individuals use the internet to publish documents previously published on paper, including manuals for software products such as video games, handbooks for products such as mobile phones, product catalogues or price lists and white papers on products or product families. Since most of these documents are obviously aimed at the public – e.g. actual or potential customers – and so meant for publication, the date given can be taken as a date of publication.