The French commission (Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres), serves in an advisory position.

CVA is the first and oldest research project of the Union Académique Internationale, a federation of academies (national institutions of an advisory scientific character) from 61 countries (2015).

[3] The Union was the inspiration of Edmond Pottier, at the time Curator of Antiquities at the Louvre, the national museum of France (and former royal palace).

At its end 11 countries had joined, the six mentioned above plus Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, and the United States.

The CVA mostly publishes Greek (including Italian) pottery between the seventh millennium BC and late antiquity (third-fifth century AD).

Since 2004 all textual descriptions and images are freely accessible as a web-based database (CVA Online).

Integral parts of the documentation are photographs and hand-drawings depending on the condition of the vessel and the projects budget.

The Austrian commission used for the first-time of the CVA project a 3D scanner for documentation of vessel shapes in 2006.

[8] The high-resolution 3D datasets of the Austrian projects were processed using the GigaMesh Software Framework providing digital profile lines and unwrappings (or rollouts)[9] as basis for the figures of the final publication.

Every participating country is completely responsible for its own scope, while the Union Académique Internationale in Brussels has the patronage traditionally led by a French scientist.