Is there any non-commercial alternative to ResearcherID?
ORCID is supposed to take care of that and it seems to gain significant traction. According to this presentation, it should be launched in fall this year (2012). However, I am not sure whether it falls under your definition of "non-commercial".
I am myself very curious about it, my hopes are that finally it will take care of disambiguation of names like "John Smith" - for me e.g., Web of Science database is practically unusable as it shows several thousands of papers for my name :-|.
For those of us in particle physics and related fields inSPIRE's HepNames1 service assigns a unique ID to each researcher (though they are rarely used outside of the database) and keeps track of their professional history, publications, citations and so on. My inSPIRE record is not really that inspiring, but there it is.
1 The successor project to the original SPIRES; inSPIRE also supports a rich search operation across affiliations, publications, names, and other data.