  The production of $D^{*\pm}$ mesons in deep inelastic $ep$ scattering has
been measured for exchanged photon virtualities $ 5<Q^2<1000 \gev^2 $, using an
integrated luminosity of 363 pb$^{-1}$ with the ZEUS detector at HERA.
Differential cross sections have been measured and compared to
next-to-leading-order QCD calculations. The cross-sections are used to extract
the charm contribution to the proton structure functions, expressed in terms of
the reduced charm cross section, $\sigma_{\rm red}^{c\bar{c}}$. Theoretical
calculations based on fits to inclusive HERA data are compared to the results.
