Where does Peer Review come from?
Peer Review (i.e. the review by independent colleagues/experts) in science and education can be described as the process of evaluating scientific work (in particular scientific articles) as well as higher education institutions and their study programmes through independent reviewers, so-called “peers”. The aim behind this process is quality assurance. In addition to being used for the evaluation of scientific articles in higher education, peer review as a type of external evaluation has been, for many years and worldwide, a standard procedure to assess the quality of universities and polytechnics. Thus, in the Austrian polytechnics / Universities of Applied Sciences (since 2003) as well as in the Universities sector, evaluation procedures have been in use. The areas, which are being evaluated through peer review, are: the teaching and research quality of subjects, faculties and institutes etc.
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Institutions gain manifold advantages from evaluations via peer review. They get the opportunity to define the current state of their development, to reflect on it, to compare their achievements with other institutions on a national and international scale, to deepen their contacts with national and international institutions, to exchange experiences and get stimulation for the continuous improvement of their own institutions. The advantage of Peer Review as a tool for quality assurance and quality development is that it contrasts the internal view of the institution with the reviewers’ external view and thus – ideally – productively combines two of the areas of conflict in quality management, namely self-perception and external evaluation. 
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