[2] As of July 2023, Crossref identifies and connects 150 million records of metadata about research objects made openly available for reuse without restriction.

Rather, it facilitates the links among distributed content hosted at other sites through the use of open metadata and persistent identifiers.

Crossref interlinks millions of items from a variety of content types, including journals, books, conference proceedings, research grants, working papers, technical reports, and data sets.

Linked content includes materials from scientific, technical, and medical (STM), and social sciences and humanities (SSH) disciplines.

Crossref provides a query service for its records through an open REST API and a Search form.

Optional metadata that can be entered includes the text of the article abstract, ORCID iDs of the authors, funding information, including funder registry IDs and funding award numbers, license information, and similarity check URLs.

Crossmark provides a cross-platform way for readers to quickly discover the status of a research output along with additional metadata related to the editorial process.

[7] In June 2024 a paper got wider audience when a team of researchers found fabricated metadata entered into the Crossref database, in the case of the analyzed publisher 9% of the references were wrong.