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Abstract. Measurements of the cross section for exclusive virtual-photoproduction of ρ 0 mesons from hydrogen are reported. The data were collected by the HERMES experiment using 27.5 GeV positrons incident on a hydrogen gas target in the HERA storage ring. The invariant mass W of the photon-nucleon system ranges from 4.0 to 6.0 GeV, while the negative squared four-momentum Q 2 of the virtual photon varies from 0.7 to 5.0 GeV 2 . The present data together with most of the previous data in the intermediate W -domain are well described by a model that infers the W -dependence of the cross section from the dependence on the Bjorken scaling variable x of the unpolarized structure function for deep-inelastic scattering. In addition, a model calculation based on Off-Forward Parton Distributions gives a fairly good account of the longitudinal component of the ρ 0 production cross section for Q 2 > 2 GeV 2 .2