The role of PIs in sustaining the progress and robustness of research is critically important, and yet the pressures on them - some well advised, some not - seem to keep growing. To help Nature's future coverage of these issues, I will present an overview of some of the key pressures on PIs and invite insights and proposals into how funders, universities and journals might best mitigate them.

Sir Philip Campbell is editor in chief of Nature and of the Nature Publishing Group. His areas of responsibility include the editorial content of Nature, and assuring the long-term quality of all Nature publications. He is based in London. He has a BSc in aeronautical engineering, an MSc in astrophysics, and a PhD and  postdoctoral research in upper atmospheric physics. Following his research, he became the Physical Sciences Editor of Nature and then, in 1988, the founding editor of Physics World, the international magazine of the UK Institute of Physics. He returned to Nature to take on his current role in 1995. He has worked with the UK Office of Science and Innovation, the European Commission and the US National Institutes of Health on issues relating to science and its impacts in society. For ten years until 2012 he was a trustee of Cancer Research UK.