In this paper, we critically reflect on the work undertaken during the COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) project, and in particular our work to establish the recently launched Open Book Collective. A key aim of the Open Book Collective is to reconfigure the socio-economic relations that surround the publishing and circulation of book length scholarship, by providing a new revenue stream for book publishers to fund the publication of their books on an Open Access basis. The establishment of the Open Book Collective as both a legally autonomous organisation and a digital platform and financial intermediary has involved collaborations between publishers, Open Access infrastructure providers and librarians have worked with scholars working in disciplines including cultural studies and science and technology studies. We reflect on how bringing together these different components of the higher education ecosystem, which often work relatively autonomously, has shed new light on how we might want to understand the political and practical challenges of building different futures for higher education, in the context of its increasing financialisation and assetisation. In particular, we argue that universities need to grapple better with that small but increasingly active part of academic work itself directly involved in digital infrastructure building and efforts to engage with, and respond to, the inevitable politics of platforms.