Currently, more than ten publishers have started depositing article metadata and there are 1.63 million articles from 2788 journals in the CrossRef system. Current projections are for 3 million articles by the end of the year with 500,000 to 1 million new articles per year after that. The initial focus of CrossRef is to allow primary publishers to link their references to other primary publishers. I databases to full text at publishers' sites and has already started work to include conference proceedings and other types of content in the system. The initial leadership and impetus for the CrossRef system has come from STM publishers, but CrossRef is a broad-based initiative with a goal of covering all of scholarly publishing.
CrossRef membership is open to primary scholarly publishers.
CrossRef has established some important rules for members. Members must submit metadata for all journals that they have online. Publishers then use CrossRef to lookup DOIs and add reference links to their online journals. Another requirement is that CrossRef members must provide at least a full bibliographic citation when users follow a DOI link to their site. Many publishers are planning on making abstracts free, but each individual publisher controls access to abstracts and full text.