The task force believes that the benefits of adopting EDTRs outweigh the risks of doing so. Desktop publishing and production tools are readily available, cross-platform compatible, and already in use for the production of DTRs. The free Adobe Acrobat Reader program needed to open, read, search, and print PDF files is also widely available, takes up little disk space, and requires few skills to use. Stable campus intranets hooked to the global internet in recent years enable research institutions to engage in extensive electronic publication, archiving, document sharing, and teaching projects. The costs of network disk storage and document maintenance have declined relative to the cost of maintaining archives of some categories of paperbound collections that already have low access rates.
Networked environments increase the acquisition and usage of electronic documents.
The trend in higher education is clearly toward implementing and requiring EDTRs. Although each member has developed its own policy with regard to EDTs, all are adopting uniform formats and consistent access policies that are helping to create a new global resource in original scholarship and research. Several of them, including the field leader, Virginia Tech, are only accepting DTRs in electronic format. EDTRs are cost-effective at the same time that they increase the use of theses. Currently, students pay all binding costs for three copies for the university plus doctoral students pay fees to UMI for microfilming dissertations for the privilege of publishing materials that are little-used.