You know that old tower PC you have with the CRT monitor struggling to run Windows 95 on a 486 processor? That, and your old hotmail email address is responsible for 80% of all scientific data getting lost within two decades of its inception, according to a study out of the University of British Columbia.

“Publicly funded science generates an extraordinary amount of data each year,” says Tim Vines, a visiting scholar. “Much of these data are unique to a time and place, and is thus irreplaceable, and many other datasets are expensive to regenerate.

Though one would imagine that data old enough to legally drink a beer wouldn’t be of much use, that’s not always the case. Sometimes scientists may wish to validate the results of an old experiment, or the data themselves might be useful for new applications. But, since it’s often left with the authors who publish it, it’s easy for it to disappear.

“I don’t think anybody expects to easily obtain data from a 50-year-old paper, but to find that almost all the datasets are gone at 20 years was a bit of a surprise,” said Vines.

For the analysis, which will probably also be lost eventually, Vines and colleagues attempted to collect original research data from a random set of 516 studies published between 1991 and 2011. It did not go well. They found that while all datasets were available within two years of publication, the odds of obtaining the underlying data dropped by 17 per cent per year after that. The fact that most of the samples used in the study came about in the internet age makes the findings all the more astonishing.

Vines is calling on scientific journals to require authors to upload data onto public archives as a condition for publication, adding that papers with readily accessible data are more valuable for society and thus should get priority for publication.

“Losing data is a waste of research funds and it limits how we can do science,” says Vines. “Concerted action is needed to ensure it is saved for future research.”

A reminder to all scientists: Accounts for Dropbox and Google Drive can be obtained for free.