I have all K2 settings for author turned off; however, my WMT account continues to show an /author/ path for specific users with ?pagination.

Is there a way to shut off this url creation to avoid creation of duplicate content?

Did you deactivate the K2 user profile or did you hide the elements from your category's settings?

Both the name and the URL in the Global Configuration > K2 > Layout & view options for user (author) pages are hidden. If I need to deactivate the K2 user profile, how would I do that?

It 's the "Enable K2 User Profile" setting in K2's advanced settings. Deactivating the profile will lead to several 404 errors which are bad since these URLs are already crawled.

I would suggest that you create a menu item towards all K2 categories. This way all the orphan authors and tags will render through that menu item. This way no more double content.

I understand these will 404, but isn't that ok since they are truly duplicate? The actual K2 URL will continue to be properly indexed, correct? If I disable K2 user profile in Advanced K2 Global configurations, will that eliminate the following WMT pagination errors by author moving forward?

Pages with duplicate meta descriptions
/K2 category name/author/311-AuthorName
/K2 category name/author/311-AuthorName?start=10
/K2 category name/author/311-AuthorName?start=20
/K2 category name/author/311-AuthorName?start=30
/K2 category name/author/311-AuthorName?start=40
/K2 category name/author/311-AuthorName?start=60
/K2 category name/author/311-AuthorName?start=70
/K2 category name/author/311-AuthorName?start=80
/K2 category name/author/313-AuthorName?start=20

Thank you!

These are paginated pages. These links are not duplicate content. The ?start parameter is added from Joomla!'s pagination.

If you want to play safe, you can use a canonical link plugin (for K2) which will either link to the initial author page and/or it will generate the rel next/previous tags.