Dangers of putting unpublished work online

Here's an interesting thread from the Chronicle of Higher Education: what is the colletive wisdom on "publishing" unpublished papers?.

In it, people are debating the value of putting as-yet unpublished drafts of their research online, both at university repositories, but more commonly at academia.edu. This post should give pause to those considering such an early posting:

 

Wilfred Cude's excellent and scary book "The PhD Trap" tells the story of how a prestigious journal printed (with departmental permission) a short excerpt from his dissertation. But the journal came out before his dissertation defense, and his dean denied him the PhD because he violated the rule about using already-published matter. His own, and only by a month or two. He fought that decision for years, but lost. University of Alberta, I believe it was.