I'll believe it when I see it in a peer reviewed journal--published by more than one group. Until then, it's a USO (unidentified superconducting object). If it were real, then reports would be all over the March Meeting of the American Physical Society which is celebrating 100 years of superconductivity this year.
As a condensed matter researcher, agreed. I don't believe that somebody with that level of laboratory equipment (4 probe system, furnace, pellet press etc) can't afford a $150 journal submission fee.
Don't get me wrong - I love DIY science and I don't think a physics journal is the only path to being accepted, but it IS the fastest way to overcome skepticism.
I don't know about physics, but in robotics and computer vision and CS, there is no correlation between credible research and journal publication. I suppose physics attracts more quacks, though, and it's not quite as easy to verify because you need expensive equipment generally owned only by people who publish in journals all the time anyway.
If you look into the history of high temperature superconductors (or any realm of physics where 'world changing' is in play... like fusion), it's full of quacks, frauds, overeager scientists publishing before checking properly, unrepeatable experiments, or just plain honest errors.
There is a correlation (most good CS researchers publish in journals), but it is not as strong as in physics. Also, the lead times are much longer. In CS conferences typically play the role that journals play in most other fields.
The fact that CS mostly uses refereed conferences as the publishing medium is an ongoing issue when comparing with other fields. One favorite anecdote I heard was the CS guy who was told off at a faculty review by a physicist for getting a "Best paper" award at a conference, he shouldn't spend so much time on frivolous presentations :)
Unpublished claims of superconductivity and cold-fusion should be regarded as suspiciously as unpublished claims of proving P!=NP.
If someone claims to have code that can distinguish between apples and oranges it's much easier to check the claim than to reproduce the experiments the physicists did.
