  A unified QCD formulation of leptoproduction of massive quarks in charged
current and neutral current processes is described. This involves adopting
consistent factorization and renormalization schemes which encompass both
vector-boson-gluon-fusion (flavor creation) and
vector-boson-massive-quark-scattering (flavor excitation) production
mechanisms. It provides a framework which is valid from the threshold for
producing the massive quark (where gluon-fusion is dominant) to the very high
energy regime when the typical energy scale \mu is much larger than the quark
mass m_Q (where the quark-scattering should be prevalent). This approach
effectively resums all large logarithms of the type (alpha_s(mu)
log(mu^2/m_Q^2)^n which limit the validity of existing fixed-order calculations
to the region mu ~ O(m_Q). We show that the (massive) quark-scattering
contribution (after subtraction of overlaps) is important in most parts of the
(x, Q) plane except near the threshold region. We demonstrate that the
factorization scale dependence of the structure functions calculated in this
approach is substantially less than those obtained in the fixed-order
calculations, as one would expect from a more consistent formulation.
