The Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of datatypes. Dryad is governed by a nonprofit membership organization. Membership is open to any stakeholder organization, including but not limited to journals, scientific societies, publishers, research institutions, libraries, and funding organizations. Dryad originated from an initiative among a group of leading journals and scientific societies in evolutionary biology and ecology to adopt a joint data archiving policy (JDAP) for their publications, and the recognition that easy-to-use, sustainable, community-governed data infrastructure was needed to support such a policy. In this briefing, I discuss how Dryad has evolved to meet the needs of the broader research community, highlight challenges in the data preservation landscape, and summarize the approaches that have been adopted to identify and provide services that meet the needs of researchers. -- Professor and Director of e-Science Program, College of University Libraries and Learning Sciences; Project Director, EPSCoR State Program; Project Director, DataONE; Editor, ESA Data Papers; Associate Editor, Int.