Not quite sure how this important discussion has escaped our comment here in the lounge. Thanks to a link from HUP's publicity blog, I see that the extraordinary Lindsay Waters, executive humanities editor at Harvard University Press, is writing and speaking about a coming shift away from monographs as the gold standard in humanities, towards articles. Here's a link to his piece at insidehighereducation last year (what he's referring to as slow writing--a movement to write less and better at the same time) and to an ihe article about his ideas recently.
When Waters' article in The Journal of Scholarly Publishing goes on-line, I'll be back with some more thoughts about this.
I find this intriguing--in no small part because the shift away from monographs in the humanities seems to be occurring at the same time that a shift towards them is occurring in law.
Update as of February 19--Waters' article is available on-line here via project Muse.
Update as of March 2: Here's a post on "scholarship after the [stock market] fall," which addresses Waters' article in more detail.