The comment of Dubrovinskaia et al. is scientifically flawed. The high-pressure form of boron, discovered by Oganov et al., is indeed new and its bonding has a significant ionic character, as demonstrated in Ref. 1.
@article{arxiv.0908.0489,
title = {New high-pressure form of boron is significantly ionic},
author = {Artem R. Oganov and Jiuhua Chen and Carlo Gatti and Yanzhang Ma and Yanming Ma and Colin W. Glass and Zhenxian Liu and Tony Yu and Oleksandr O. Kurakevych and Vladimir L. Solozhenko},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0908.0489},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
This manuscript was submitted to Nature as Reply to 'Brief Communication Arising' by Dubrovinskaia et al. (arXiv:0907.1900) and caused the rejection of the latter with publication of Addendum by Oganov et al. (Nature 460, 292 (2009))