Now help is on the way. Columbia University Press will edit the manuscripts, set up and administer the site and sell subscriptions to it. The project, dubbed Gutenberg-e, is aimed at expanding the definition of scholarly publishing. For the first time thousands of pages of source material and archives, upon which the dissertations are based, would be available to subscribers. D's in endangered fields, like African or South Asian history, European history before 1800, military history outside the United States and Colonial Latin America, so they can revise their dissertations into books and put them on the Web.
Unpublished monographs mean more than a disappointed author.
The monograph is the cultural capital of scholarship. It is by definition original research, usually on a narrowly focused area, to make a significant contribution and stimulate further study by other scholars. It is essential for obtaining tenure and as a building block for future research. Perhaps the most serious obstacle to on-line monographs is legitimacy. Scholars need to distinguish between a book that is put on the Web by the teen-ager next door and one that is judged worthy by a committee of scholars.