  EROS has been monitoring few million stars in the Magellanic clouds, as well
as toward the Galactic bulge and spiral arms since 1996, to search for
microlensing events. In this paper, we present briefly the EROS setup and
scientific program and discuss the results obtained from our observations in
four directions in the Galactic plane, away from the bulge. Seven light curves,
out of 9.1 million stars observed in these directions show luminosity
variations interpreted as due to microlensing. The averaged estimated optical
depth tau = 0.45 +0.24 -0.11 is compatible with expectations from simple
Galactic models. Nonetheless a small excess of short time-scale events may be
present in the direction closest to the Galactic center.
