The 2025 Bit List Is a Wake-Up Call for Pharma

The 2025 Bit List has landed! Released by the Digital Preservation Coalition on World Digital Preservation Day, the list identifies the digital materials most at risk of being lost to time. Among them: electronic health records, unpublished research data and online databases. The Bit List isn’t just designed to trigger curiosity, it’s there to encourage action.

The Categories

Which pharma file types should keep you awake?

The Bit List doesn’t simply warn you that “data is at risk”, it provides detailed information. And for pharma and life sciences, many of them hit close to home.

Electronic health records (EHRs), now officially listed as endangered often rely on proprietary databases and custom software that stop working when vendors retire them or systems are decommissioned.

Clinical and laboratory data face the same issue. Proprietary instrument files from chromatographs, spectrometers, or sequencing platforms can only be opened by legacy software or drivers that no longer run on modern operating systems.

Even formats we think of as “safe” like Excel, SAS, SPSS, or MATLAB aren’t immune. They depend on macros, plug-ins, and software versions that potentially won’t exist in ten years.

Finally, there’s imaging and media data, a growing preservation headache. The Bit List flags DICOM medical imaging formats and video files like AVI, MOV, and MP4 which are common in clinical studies, lab recordings, and training materials. Without preservation measures these can quickly become unreadable as codecs or viewers evolve.

Why this matters for pharma

Every unreadable dataset represents wasted R&D investment. Every obsolete format risks a compliance failure. Every inaccessible patient record weakens the foundations of evidence-based medicine.

Digital decay undermines reproducibility and regulatory credibility, and it destroys the potential for future value.

Digital records and data are both an asset and a potential liability. Without a preservation strategy that actively combats obsolescence, those assets could be at risk.

Final thought

The threat to valuable GxP records and data is unfolding quietly, in data silos, decommissioned systems, and forgotten archives.

If your digital assets matter, treat preservation as part of your innovation strategy, not an afterthought.

Because the future of medicine depends on the data we can still read.