CrossRef is the brainchild of Publishers International Linking Association (PILA), a group comprised of some of the most important scientific and academic publishers in the world including: AAS, Academic Press, American Institute of Physics, Association of Computing Machinery, Elsevier Science, Oxford University Press, and John Wiley.  With well over 60 publishers participating, more than 2 million articles now include direct links from bibliographic citations to full-text or an abstract.  According to Ed Pentz, the executive director of PILA, "CrossRef functions as a sort of digital switchboard. It holds no full text content, but creates linkages through Digital Object Identifier (DOI) numbers, which are tagged to article metadata supplied by participating publishers" (College & Research Library News 62, no.2 (2001): 207). 
(While you are searching you will see the DOI number at the end of citations to publications participating in CrossRef. Click here for a full description of the DOI program.)

By clicking on a CrossRef link, a researcher will connect to the publisher's web site showing a full bibliographical citation and in most cases an abstract. The full-text article can then be accessed through the appropriate mechanism: subscribers generally can go straight to the full-text, while non-subscribers receive information on how to gain access via subscription, document delivery or pay-per-view. Abstracts and full-text articles remain at the publishers' sites and access to the material is determined by agreements between the Library and the publisher.

CrossRef doesn't cost the Library anything; its expenses are covered by the membership fees of the  publishers. One reminder for Brooklyn College users: before paying for a full-text article check to see if we have an online subscription to the journal title first (the publisher's web site may not recognize you as a Brooklyn College subscriber). We subscribe to a host of publishers' packages many of which are active participants in the program including: MathSciNet, Biological Sciences,  Ideal Library (Academic Press), Wiley Interscience Journals, and Sociological Abstracts. You can search CUNY+ to see if a title is a Brooklyn Web Resource or check the Library's homepage for a list of electronic research resources available to you.

To take a look at how the service works we have included a sample search for you. 
Say you are looking for articles on frogs and decide to search Ideal Library.
Go to: http://www.idealibrary.com/  and search the IDEAL category Life Sciences for articles on frogs. When you get your search results click to retrieve the first abstract, then click on references. Where ever you see an underlined resource such as [Medline] or [Ideal] you know you have a direct link to a full bibliographic citation and abstract with an option to purchase or view full-text (remembering that our subscription to online access to full-text Ideal titles--for example--only covers 1999 to date).

As more and more publishers get on board with this hugely ambitious project, it's not difficult to envision how much time and energy (not to mention frustration!) will be saved by scholars actively involved in ongoing research. 

Please note: CrossRef does not appear as a link on the Library's web site because it works behind the scenes for the sole benefit of the scholarly community. For more information about the CrossRef project go to http://www.crossref.org.