Allowing references to unpublished content

I have a solid use-case where editors need to be able to add references to unpublished content. They will schedule both the referencing items and the referenced item for publication, and these must not be publicly discoverable until the scheduled time.

Entityreference adds a generic "node_access" tag to the query, but the resulting access check does not appear to respect the "view own unpublished content" permission. I guess the query running over ajax results in the user being anonymous at the server?

It doesn't seem possible to remove the node_access tag via hook_query_alter().

I can hack the node_access tag out as a temporary solution, but that's a potential problem waiting to bite me. Does anyone have any suggestions for a cleaner way to implement this?