Contrary to what you read in Nature, Open Access has not caused the growth in science publishing

"I wasn’t planning on spending my Thanksgiving delving into PubMed statistics to refute yet another bogus claim about open access publishing. But being a vegan, I didn’t really have much else to do anyway. So… The newest Nature has an Op-Ed from Martijn Arns, a brain researcher in the Netherlands with a title I couldn’t ignore: “Open access is tiring out peer reviewers“. He complains about poor quality (not negative) reviews he’s gotten on some recent papers, and asserts that this is due to an increase in the burden on peer reviewers with the rise of digital publishing. I agree with him – there are deep problems with the way we go about peer review – and his solution to the problem – implement post-publication peer review – is spot on. But as the trolly title of the article (which I suspect was added by Nature and not by Arns) suggests, Arns argues that the increase in publishing volume, and therefore reviewer workload, is due to the rise of open access. It is, of course true, that open access publishing has been growing rapidly, and thus it might seem to some people that the growth in scientific publishing overall is due primarily to open access. But impressions can often be wrong, so I decided to look at some data. I used PubMed to get data on the total number of papers published annually since 2000 and PubMed Central to determine the fraction of these articles that are open access. (The numbers aren’t perfect, since some journals have made their back content open access, slightly inflating the number of open access articles from early years. But this is a small effect.) ..."