About

White Rose Research Online (WRRO) is the jointly-managed repository for research produced by the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York.

Mission

Our purpose is to:

  1. Provide open access to full-text research outputs from the three Universities, wherever possible.
  2. Make research easier to find, bringing scholarly works to new audiences inside and outside academia.
  3. Provide a long-term home for research outputs from the three Universities, preserving research for posterity.
  4. Provide a reliable source of information about the Universities’ research.

All three Universities are signatories of The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), with its vision to “advance practical and robust approaches to research assessment globally and across all scholarly disciplines.”. The open access WRRO repository also supports the FAIR principle, that research outputs should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The repository is one of the tools that the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York use to make their research outputs available in line with these initiatives.

Content

The repository contains research outputs from staff at each of the three Universities, including journal articles, books, book chapters, working papers, conference papers, discussion papers, and more. Our aim is to make full-text versions of our scholars' research outputs available to a global audience without barrier. Where this is not possible due to copyright or other restrictions, we create a citation with an abstract and link to a publisher's version of the research (where available).

The repository is an online archive. It is not a publisher. There may be differences between the repository copy of a paper, for example, and the final version of record published in a journal. We do not track corrigenda, addenda, subsequent correspondence in the journal, post-peer review comments, or retractions. The validity and authenticity of content is the sole responsibility of depositing authors.

Visibility

Items in White Rose Research Online are indexed by major academic search engines and finding aids, including Google Scholar and University Library catalogues.

As well as being available through White Rose Research Online, items are harvested and/or made discoverable through a number of services including, but not limited to:

Operation

The repository is managed, operationally and strategically, by White Rose Libraries, the collaboration between the University Libraries of Leeds, Sheffield and York. Teams drawn from across the three institutions set scope, policy and strategy for the repository, and also manage its day-to-day operation and development.

WRRO was originally created as part of the Jisc/CURL funded SHERPA (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access) project.

Software

The site is powered by EPrints 3.3.16, free software devised by the University of Southampton.