White Rose Libraries is very pleased to announce that the next stage of the  Repository Renewal Project is now complete, concluding with the successful platform upgrade for White Rose Research Online (WRRO) in April. 

The Repositories Renewal Project aimed to identify and implement the next iteration of the repositories infrastructure. Following a review of the repository requirements, a period of consultancy and market testing in 2024, WRL made the decision to renew its commitment to EPrints platform as the best available infrastructure for the next phase of the repositories service. This decision culminated in both WRRO and WREO being upgraded to the latest release of the EPrints platform (EPrints 3.4.6). WREO was upgraded first, successfully moving to the live server in January 2025. WRRO has now also upgraded. For more information about our Repositories Renewal Project, read the in-depth report available on the Repositories webpage. 

The upgraded platform improves accessibility and security for both repositories, as well delivering improvements to system performance. This latest release of EPrints paves the way for additional functionality and provides the foundational infrastructure for new features that will be investigated in the future. By increasing content visibility and improving indexing in Google Scholar, the upgrade will help to make research more visible and accessible, and embed it more effectively in the open research environment. 

 Together, WRRO and WREO form the second most used repository service in the UK (see our latest Quarterly report for more detail on repository usage and download stats), and maintaining this service is one the key priorities for WRL. The upgrade ensures that WRL can continue to effectively surface research outputs from the universities of Leeds, Sheffield, and York, providing a green open access route to research which would otherwise be behind paywalls.