Graduate students are eliminating the paper trail.

Graduate students who are writing a thesis or dissertation are now required to submit their work electronically.

Bradley Bond, associate dean of the graduate school, said this change will be more convenient for graduate students, especially ones who are traveling.

“It’s a boon for students who are far away from campus,” Bond said.

It will also save paper. Diane Johns, an NIU thesis adviser, said the average thesis or dissertation can run anywhere from 50 to 300 pages. On occasion, the thesis and dissertation readers at the Graduate Schools receive works up to 500 or 1,000 pages.

The new process eliminates the need to print out multiple copies, but doctoral students are still required to print a copy for the defense. The new electronic format adds new possibilities for graduate students.

“It’s going to make it possible for students to put other kinds of things other than text [into the document],” Johns said. She said engineering students would be able to add graphics depicting their projects. Bond also said music students could embed .WAV files into the document.

“Students can liven them in appropriate ways,” Bond said.

In the past, doctoral students paid $55 to have their work available on ProQuest, an online database used to search for newspapers and other journal articles. With the new system, doctoral students as well as graduate students can pay to have their work published on ProQuest for a fee of $65 and $55, respectively. All of the fees would be paid directly to ProQuest instead of going through NIU, said Johns, minimizing the chance of losing the payment.

However, Bond warned graduate students to decide how they want their theses and dissertations to be published. These options can include immediate publishing after graduation to delaying that by several years.

“They have a lot of choice here and they need to be aware of that and the consequences,” Bond said.

Thesis adviser Carolyn Law described the submission system as simple.

“If you can buy tickets online, you can successfully submit your thesis or dissertation electronically,” Law wrote in an e-mail.

Law said the new submission process has been tested on a small scale since fall 2006. Bond said that there were major technical problems with the system, but Law was cautious.

“As with any new procedure, issues may arise as large numbers of students begin to participate,” Law said.

Brandon Borgman, a graduate student in industrial management, said he was initially unaware of the change. But when told about the program, Borgman said he liked the ability to include other media.

“From my end, it’d be pretty helpful to have animation and other things in it,” Borgman said.

Staff writer James Tschirhart also contributed to this story.