Having users remember and enter passwords is impractical because users forget and have to call the library or systems office to have the passwords reset, so we embed the userid and password into the URL for the journal link. Despite that seemingly loose security the arrangement has worked well for all parties concerned. In the years we have done this we have discovered maybe one or two clever users who deciphered the password and took it home or to their next workplace. We consider this an adequate tradeoff. OK, we proceed according to our word.
Publishers can always re-evaluate the contract at renewal time.
We have even had an occasional case of a publisher calling us mid-year, saying the usage statistics are so high or so low that they want to revise the contract immediately. As a result, we suffer from reliability problems and our licensing agreements are a little bit different from a traditional library's, but we choose to concentrate our resources on access and on-time delivery. We support a business, not a scholarly community. This seems to matter to publishers when we negotiate agreements. On the other hand, I think Boeing Co. takes the opposite approach and loads data locally.