These are tough times. Everywhere you look money is tight, budgets are stagnant or shrinking, we're being asked to cut costs, and incorporating money saving methods to keep those costs down are becoming commonplace. I started out 2011 (actually ended 2010) intent on doing my part in not only cutting costs in the operation of my lab/office, but greening them up as well.

As I looked about my office there was one thing that jumped out at me. The volume of paper which was cluttering my desk and shelves (I actually have a set of metal shelves I purchased two years ago to hold all the scientific papers I've printed out in the past several years).

Paper, paper, everywhere,

Until all the trees were dead.

Paper, paper, everywhere,

Nothing interesting to be read.

Coleridge, if he had ever seen my office.

Between the cost of paper and the price of ink, I imagine that I have spent a lot of institutional money printing out versions of my manuscripts, other peoples scientific papers, progress reports, and other assorted stuff. It all adds up over time.

I'm not sure how much my institution pays in paper and ink costs each year (though I'm going to ask), but I'm sure it's significant. As such, it seemed like an "easy" thing to tackle. Now, I placed easy in quotes because I'm a big fan of reading hard copy papers, and I know habits are a hard thing to break. However when reviewing manuscripts I'm often writing notes in the margins only then having to go back over to Word to then type them in. So why not skip the pen/paper middleman?

The same goes with manuscript revisions. I think "track changes" is one of the most annoying, albeit useful, features in Word. Same goes for the "comments" feature as well. By committing to these practices, I've now effectively handled paper wasting related to the manuscript review process (both my own, and for others I review). However, what to do with science reports?

To address this issue, I relied on a couple of programs I already had on hand.

1. EndNote (version X3)

2. Adobe Acrobat Pro (version 9)

Now, going out and buying EndNote won't help you cut down on your bottom line ... at least for the short term. Same goes for Adobe Acrobat Pro. However if you have them on hand, or can find freeware (or cheaper) software which does that which I will explain ... go for it! For example, I know there are two programs which go by the names Mendeley and Papers which (from what I've heard) are both great reference managers and come at no to minimal cost. I know of no alternative for making comments in PDFs than Acrobat Pro (can someone offer any alternatives)?

I used to use EndNote simply to insert references into manuscripts, but since it can also link to PDFs on your hard drive (and in my experience can pull down ~70% of all PDFs it searches for from the internet), it becomes a great office tool as well.

To date I've managed to collect over 1,100 PDFs into EndNote. I've joked with co-workers that if we ever lost our internet connection for an extended period of time, I'd likely be one of the only scientists who'd be able to write their papers because all of them are neatly saved to my desktop. If you figure an average of 10 pages per report, that's over 11,000 pieces of paper (5,500 if I print front/back) that won't need to be printed out. Of course that number is going to increase as the year progresses.

The other beauty of EndNote is that, like iTunes, you can create labels within each library and even use a smart search to create labels under which particular papers (i.e., anything with "anaerobe in the title", or "Smith, AB as author") will automatically be filed. Also, the fact that it interfaces nicely with Scopus, PubMed, Web of Science, and even Google Scholar means that pulling your favorite papers off the internet are rather simple. EndNote X4 which is even sweeter allows you to drop and drag a PDF into EndNote. Once dropped, EndNote grabs the DOI number and fills out a new entry automatically ... so if you have access to the PDF, you can skip the import or "add a new entry" step altogether.

Obviously I won't be able to stop printing paper altogether. There will be instances when it's necessary ... however with fillable PDFs, and electronic signatures, those times can (if one commits to the practice) be few and far between. I'm almost halfway through January and I have yet to print anything out for work (and I've been at work since the beginning of the year, so it's been a legit almost two weeks of official work).

So why? Well, I've spent a lot of time talking about the need to be more conscientious of our environment, of not wasting resources. I think it'd be somewhat hypocritical on my part to ignore resources that have been made available to me that would allow me to "green up" my work environment and lifestyle, even a little bit (and every little bit helps). Taking steps to reduce vampiric power consumption, reducing food waste, and now reducting my ink and paper consumption are the steps I'm incorporating to reduce my overall carbon footprint. Next I'm going to tackle my daily commute, but for now I'm going to look into how to make my office that much more electronic (without the need to buy expensive and/or flashy hardware ... which is going to be an even bigger temptation because I'd love me an awesome tablet like the Toshiba Honeycomb).

Has anyone had experience with an electronic office? Tips and tricks would be more than welcome.