Publishers: please provide EZproxy support

A recent full and frank discussion about the relative merits of EZproxy and Shibboleth between Nicole Harris and Dave Pattern (and others, e.g. Paul Stainthorp) can be summarised as:

• EZproxy is great if you start at your library's site or university's portal because then users are authenticated at the beginning of a session and they can link seamlessly from one resource to another whilst retaining that authentication
• Shibboleth (or Athens or OpenAthens) is great if a user starts elsewhere (Google, Pubmed, a publisher's TOC alert) because the user can establish their authentication when challenged, via a WAYF. (And that will become better / more intuitive one day).
• Publishers are evil and are deliberately trying to reduce the usage of their content.

It occurs to me that publishers are probably quite keen to get their stuff read - but they could do much more to support us beleaguered librarians in the use of EZproxy, as they currently do with Shibboleth.

We currently provide "reload this page via EZproxy" functionality via either our LibX toolbar or a JavaScript bookmarklet.

But if I could log into each of my publisher admin interfaces and specify my EZproxy prepend login URL (http://ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/login?url=, seeing as you asked) then these sites could also reload themselves via EZproxy.

An off-campus user who has arrived unauthenticated at the publisher's site could then use the site's Institutional Login feature to identify themselves as a member of the University of Liverpool. (Why does a WAYF - admittedly ugly and clumsy as it is - have to be limited to Shibboleth?). The publisher's system would then reload the page that the user wanted, but now with our EZproxy login string added (e.g. http://ezproxy.liv.ac.uk/login?url=http://www.nature.com/ instead of http://www.nature.com/). The user is prompted to login to EZproxy and they get access to the content they wanted.

[Edit]
I forgot to mention: this would also make TOC email alerts much easier to use. When a user registered for TOC alerts they could specify their institution and that would mean that links to TOC alerts could include that institution's EZproxy string in the URL so that the links actually worked off-campus without any further action from the user.

Now, I'm a librarian not a developer, but that can't be difficult or expensive to implement. Can it?