Complex historical, political and strategic military reasons. Historically, the western powers were always more aligned towards Pakistan. They viewed it as a garrison state against communism. India was a founder member of the Non-aligned Movement in the cold war, but in reality, it was pushed towards Russia by western policies. During the war of Bangladesh Liberation in 1971, the US sent ships to intimidate India and it was only when Russia sent a nuclear submarine to support India honoring their Friendship treaty that the US backed off. Currently, India is trying to diversify its military sourcing, but it still has > 70% Russian sourced military equipment, especially fighter jets, AWACS, mid-air refuelers, etc. It would be political suicide if India is left militarily vulnerable as a result of blowing off Russia.

There should be another option for this, something like "I am now working remotely permanently as my employer has closed down all physical offices"

Read that paper again - e.g. for Cardiac Arrythmias it says Of the 38,615,491 vaccinated individuals included in our study, 385,508 (1.0%) were admitted to hospital with or died from cardiac arrhythmia at any time in the study period (either before or after vaccination); 86,754 (0.2%) of these occurred in the 1-28 days after any dose of vaccine. Those are the raw numbers of incidence of those events. That does not mean that those events were caused by taking the vaccines. If 2000 of those millions of people in the study stubbed their toes, would you also include that number as a causal effect?

Also, it does not make sense even if they are offering a lower priced e-book than a physical version to regular consumers - they must be priced to make them a profit even if consumers might buy only the lower priced e-book version and not buy the physical book at all at the prices they have set.

Let us for a moment accept the premise that Publishers want to ensure that e-books don't hurt their bottom line due to library borrowings, and also ignore that it actually costs them much less to 'produce' an e-book than it does to produce a physical copy. What I don't understand is if their way to ensure this equivalence is to treat e-books like physical books (even down to artificially expiring a licence after 26 borrowings), then where do they get off charging libraries MORE per e-book copy than a physical copy?

GP is correct - not quite three thousand years, but close. From https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... : Some of the earliest example of an administrative meritocracy, based on civil service examinations, dates back to Ancient China. The concept originates, at least by the sixth century BC, when it was advocated by the Chinese philosopher Confucius, who "invented the notion that those who govern should do so because of merit, not of inherited status. This sets in motion the creation of the imperial examinations and bureaucracies open only to those who passed tests.

Both. If you wanted to only have people who have a master's degree, you can do that. Or someone who is resident in the UK but holds another nationality. An ADDITIONAL thing you can do is to restrict that to the representative sample.

Prolific guard against this too - they are the sole custodians of respondents' data. Researchers only see an anonymised id. As they operate in the UK, privacy protection is orders of magnitude better than what is legally required from a US corporation as they need to be GDPR compliant.

Best in almost all respects - easy for researchers to target slices of audience demographics that they want. For respondents, they pay a minimum of £5.00 per hour. Respondents are also pre-screened - once you get to take a survey there is zero chance of being "screened out" halfway through it. They also have a very strict verification process - video selfie with ID verification, ISP whitelists etc. - so minimizing the risk that your respondents are sat in a call centre in Gurugram or Manila masquerading as US citizens. They also check for consistency and quality of responses - if they suspect that a respondent is masquerading as someone they are not, or fail too many attention checks, then they reserve the right to terminate their accounts and they do that regularly.

If you had bothered to read the link I provided, it is a representation of the population demographics of the country you want to operate the survey in - A representative sample is a sample which reflects the demographic distribution of a given (often national) population,

Prolific are one of the best survey platforms out there. It is not true that they offered "no mechanism" to ensure proper sampling. They offer the option of targeting a "representative sample" - see https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fresearcher-help.prolif... This costs more than just picking a random sample. So researchers who valued getting a representative sample already had a mechanism to do so. Also, Prolific have taken note of the problems caused by going viral on TikTok and have been very transparent about lessons learnt and what they are doing to tackle the problem. See https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.prolific.co%2Fwe-re...

Agreed, I was in no way justifying extortionate subscription charges. But conversely, it is not as simple as publishing your research in your personal blog or even on a pre-print server. Think of the chaos that will ensue if it was a free for all. How would anyone be able to separate the genuine research from the crackpots?
The answer surely lies in between the two extremes. The root of the problem is that the academic community needs gatekeepers for research, but they cannot or are unwilling to do the gatekeeping themselves. If they offload that to commercial enterprises, then free market capitalism without regulation will always lead to the status quo.

From the PLOS website

2019 Highlights (see figures below for a fuller picture)
As of December 31st, 2019, PLOS had net assets of $11.8 million, improved by $1.1 million compared to the previous year’s $10.7 million.
Of the 2019 year-end net assets, cash and unrestricted investments totaled $12.5 million compared to $11.5 million at year-end 2018.
For the year ending December 31st, 2019, PLOS generated total revenues of $31.6 million compared to total revenues of $31.7 million for the year ending December 31st, 2018.
2019 total expenses of $30.5 million compared with $38 million in 2018.
2019 yielded a net operating surplus of $1.1m compared to a net operating deficit of $6.3m in 2018.

So, hardly a roaring commercial success. They also claim to be providing publication assistance to the tune of $1.7 million in 2019. That is revenue from fees that they have "forgiven" or discounted because authors claimed an exemption.

The NEJM, Nature, Science etc. are seen to be bestowing prestige because they claim they act as gatekeepers of quality and relevance. They achieve this by having a very arduous review process. They will typically accept less than 5% of all submissions. If they publish 1000 articles per year, that means that their staff will have to deal with > 20,000 article submissions per year. And that is only for one journal. Even if the journal is Open Access and funded by Gold Open Access principles (author/funder pays, free in perpetuity), to sustain that level of activity is a huge commitment in terms of resources.

Yes, that money does not go to peer reviewers, or the authors of the paper (and often times not even to the editors of the journal!) Gold Open Access is funded by the Article Publishing Charge (APC). This is a fee charged for publishing an Open Access article. It is charged to the author(s) of the article. In most cases, the authors just fund that cost from their general research budget (which, for UKRI funded research comes from UKRI's pocket). In some cases the research budget might have a specific publication budget component. APCs can range from $50 to $4000 per article- depends on the publisher or the journal. In addition to that there might be extra charges per colour image, table etc.

Bangladesh has foreign exchange reserves of $45B currently, in 2016 they were between just below and just above $30B . Not surprising as Bangladesh has one of the largest expat populations in the world and a large chunk of that will send money in dollars back home. For comparison with neighbouring countries, Pakistan has reserves of $23B and India has reserves of $600B