I am using NCBI to get a fairly complete list of organisms and their taxonomic name. Going to look further how to find the common name programmatically. Next is where can I find the author / authority name and date, is that stored in a publicly accessible database anywhere? Where does it get stored in the first place as well, if not a central db?
That's the best I've seen so far.
Admittedly, I haven't had the need to look for it, but I have not been able to find a common list of all authorities, partly because the vast majority of these sorts of things were done a long time ago - dating back to Carl Linnaeus in the 1700's.
You could try the various authorities on naming of organisms. International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes, International Association for Plant Taxonomy, and the International Committee on Zoological Nomenclature, but even these might not work.
You may have to dig through some very old literature to find the authorities. I've done so for similar posts in the past looking at finding primary authorites, such as this one, but it is very time-consuming and not easy without a very good local reference library and academic access.
