In response to the damaging effect of rising serial costs on campus budgets, the Faculty Senate passed guidelines yesterday for Stanford libraries, faculty and departments regarding academic journals.

There were four guidelines passed regarding the budget strains on the libraries. The first guideline encouraged faculty and libraries to support affordable scholarly journals by volunteering articles and labor in the production, review and editing of publications.

The second recommended that libraries refuse bundled subscription plans. In these plans, small journal subscriptions are only offered in a package with larger, more expensive ones. These plans limit the library’s ability to make decisions on a title-by-title basis and often inflate subscription costs.

The third guideline encouraged Stanford libraries to scrutinize the pricing of journals and to discontinue subscriptions of disproportionately expensive serials. This guideline specifically singled out publisher Elsevier. In recent months, Elsevier has been criticized by other schools such as the University of California, Harvard University and Duke University, which have passed similar guidelines and academic journal restrictions.

The fourth guideline “strongly asked” faculty not to contribute articles or editorial efforts to publishers and journals that engaged in exploitive pricing, but to look to other, more reasonably priced venues for disseminating their research.

The “serial crisis” motion, which was also discussed at the previous Faculty Senate meeting, was met with little debate. Graduate School of Business Prof. Joanne Martin, who cast the one opposing vote to the motion, offered her concern over the adoption of guidelines could cut leading journals based solely on higher costs.

According to Martin, she and other faculty in her department feel that it could be harmful to staff and students alike if top-tier academic journal subscriptions were cut.

“Despite their costs, we need the top-tiered journals to keep up in our field,” she said.

The Faculty Senate was also presented with the Annual Report of the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid by Psychology Professor Hazel Markus. Within this report, Markus discussed the current status of the President’s Scholar Program at Stanford.

The program, founded in 1995, is used to encourage the top 200 students identified in each year’s admitted class to attend Stanford. The awards often include a grant for the students to pursue undergraduate research and a more favorable financial-aid package.

In recent years, the President’s Scholar Program has come under fire for a variety of reasons from faculty and students who claim it creates an elite group of students. The award has also been criticized for not having a strong effect on admitted students’ decision to matriculate.

This year, according to Martin, the admission office did not give out the Scholar Program, but instead set up a “shadow program” that kept internal records of admitted students of the Class of 2007 who would have been given the award. The admission office then followed the enrollment choices of these 200 students in order to determine if the President’s Award did in fact affect students’ decisions to attend Stanford.

Currently, the program has concluded that the Scholar Program has little effect on students’ college choice. The designated 200 students matriculted at a rate of 46 percent. This compares to the rates of 45 percent and 45.5 percent for the classes of 2006 and 2005, respectively, when the President’s Scholar Program was actually administered.

According to Martin, the program will continue into next year in order to further study the merits of the Scholar Program. The program’s future at Stanford will be decided based on the results of this study.