There's a registry that's trying to be a centralized identity database for all researchers called ORCID: http://orcid.org/ http://orcid.org/ although I don't th

There's a registry that's trying to be a centralized identity database for all researchers called ORCID: http://orcid.org/ http://orcid.org/ although I don't think any real-life authentication is really built in, so I think it's trivial to create an ORCID ID pretending to be someone else.