A “serials crisis” consumed the Faculty Senate yesterday afternoon as senate members debated a set of recommendations dealing with the high and rapidly increasing subscription costs for academic journals.

With journal subscription costs having risen as much as 50 percent in the past five years and set to rise another 12 percent this year, the Committee on Libraries recommended in a report that the senate set guidelines aimed at reducing the University’s reliance on the most expensive journals.

“The cost of journals has crippled University budgets,” said Biochemistry Prof. Doug Brutlag, who presented the report.

After more than an hour of discussion, the motion was put off for debate at another session.

The motion would follow similar actions at Duke University, Cornell University, Harvard University and the University of California in response to journal publisher Elsevier’s practices of raising prices and bundling subscriptions of small journals with important journals.

Other universities have refused to extend their contracts with the company, which publishes as many as one-fourth of the frequently used journals in the sciences. In comparison, a motion encouraging libraries to reexamine their journal subscriptions would be a mild reaction, though University Librarian Michael Keller noted that Elsevier’s contracts with Stanford are not unfavorable.

“This is a real grassroots effort,” said Biological Sciences Prof. Robert Simoni. “There is a growing list of universities that have spoken publicly.”

ASSU President Nadiya Figueroa, a senior, said that expensive journal articles harm more than just University bottom lines.

“This is a huge cost-of-living issue,” she said.

Figueroa emphasized that journal articles published in course readers, even those by the professors of the course, can become unreasonably expensive.

Keller shared that sentiment, pointing out that for-profit publishers have been known to target articles that are in course packets, increasing costs from $15 up to $60 when they determine that a journal article is in a course reader.

The proposed resolution would have said, among its four points, “Libraries are encouraged to systematically drop journals that are unconscionably or disproportionately expensive or inflationary. Special attention should be paid to Elsevier.”

It would also have encouraged faculty to withhold articles from exploitative journals.

The discussion also addressed the conflict junior faculty could face between publishing in prestigious journals and at the same time avoiding expensive journals. Many senate members said that tenure decisions should be unaffected by the journals in which a professor has published.

Others described how periodical prestige would inevitably find its way into the tenure process.

“Stanford’s process does look at the reputation a person has achieved in his or her field,” Etchemendy said. “In some fields it is impossible to have work well-known in the field if not published in certain journals.”

Discussion then diverged into a legal question of whether the senate might open the University up to lawsuits by targeting one company. Some members were concerned, but others insisted that it was important to highlight one company.

“I would love for Elsevier to sue us,” Keller said to widespread laughter.

Joss asked whether the bad reputation of this journal company was affecting its bottom line and whether the top levels of management were concerned.

Keller noted, however, that he received six calls from stock analysts in the past month and had to tell them that for every university like Stanford there are hundreds of libraries that have “jumped on the escalator” and accepted Elsevier’s negotiating tactics, thinking they received good deals.

Some universities, though, have taken hard lines against the company, canceling contracts and inviting press coverage. The University of California lacked electronic access to Elsevier’s journals for six months while negotiations were taking place, according to Brutlag. In the end, the company’s journals cost the University of California half its journal budget, though they made up just one-fourth of the journals that were used.

Since digital journal use is gaining popularity, senate members are also trying to sort out the conflict between convenience and expense, for-profit and non-profit journals. The line between what was exploitative and what was not is not always clear, but for-profit companies were singled out as more likely to take advantage of a University’s captive community.

The library system has already cut costs by over $500,000 from the approximately $5 million journal budget by eliminating duplicate journal subscriptions among different libraries, especially as more are accessible online.

The resolution was designed to take on the problem of expensive journals from two sides, the faculty who sustain the journals and the libraries that purchase them.

Keller also signaled a number of new initiatives — from digitizing University theses to creating a central digital journal archive — that were in preparation but lacked funding to get started.

“Digital repositories are going to be the infrastructure of the future,” Keller said. “It’s very important that we invest as a university.”

But digital publishing has not been the economic panacea that some originally thought it would be.

“Digital publishing started at Stanford,” Simoni said. “I can still hear [Keller] saying, ‘We’re going to put this together and get the Elseviers of this world.’”

Now, despite efforts of non-profits like Highwire Press, costs for some journals’ electronic versions are greater than the cost for the print versions.

The library also reported continuing cutbacks in service due to budget cuts. Still, the University opened libraries this winter break for twice as long as previous winter breaks, according to Keller.

University Provost John Etchemendy also announced that Robert Joss, dean of the Graduate School of Business, and Jim Plummer, dean of the School of Engineering, would both continue to serve as deans after having their terms renewed. Both Joss and Plummer have served as deans for the last five years.

In other business, the senate approved small changes to the judicial bylaws and principle investigator policies on research.