Publish/subscribe systems provide useful platforms for delivering data (events) from publishers to subscribers in a decoupled fashion. Developing efficient publish/subscribe schemes in dynamic distributed systems is still an open problem for complex subscriptions (spanning multidimensional intervals). We propose a distributed R-tree (DR-tree) structure that uses R-tree-based spatial filters to construct a peer-to-peer overlay optimized for scalable and efficient selective dissemination of information. We adapt well-known variants of R-trees to organize publishers and subscribers in balanced peer-to-peer networks that support content-based filtering in publish/subscribe systems. DR-tree overlays guarantee subscription and publication times logarithmic in the size of the network while keeping space requirements low (comparable to distributed hash tables). The maintenance of the overlay is local and the structure is balanced with height logarithmic in the number of nodes. DR-tree overlays disseminate messages with no false negatives and very few false positives in the embedded publish/subscribe system. In addition, we propose self-stabilizing algorithms that guarantee consistency despite failures and changes in the peer population.